From: jacob@fy.chalmers.se (Jacob Hallen)
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.lp
Subject: Re: A summary of the GD-discussion [a little longer, too]
Date: 16 Oct 92 23:23:43 GMT
Organization: Chalmers University of Technology, Physics Departement, Gothenburg

In article <1bkd3sINNctf@fbi-news.Informatik.Uni-Dortmund.DE> rg@trillian.informatik.uni-dortmund.de (Rudolf Gross) writes:
>
>Stat:	Jacob Hallen and JnA claim: "It is as we say, and most
>	experienced wizards are of the same opinion."
>
>M2cw:	Doubtable. In fact that you aren't right, it is
>	wrong. If you are right, it's irrelevant. I think it
>	is wiser to PROVE your statements and don't rely on
>	the the fact that other ones think what you think.
>	By the way: How do you know that "most experienced
>	wizards" are on your side ? In Germany this statement
>	is probably wrong, since at least 2 MUDs converted
>	from CD to Amylaar recently. I'd be more careful with that.

First of all, your statement is wrong. JnA made no claim, I did. I
claimed that ALL wizards I had discussed the matter with (including
a rather large number of the GD hackers) were of similar opinion.
This is a very different claim from the one you are attributing to me.
Second, readability is something that is determined by people. If a
a large number of people consider your code unreadable, there is
most certainly room for improvement.
Third, I didn't know that we had at least 3 CDDriver sites in Germany.
Are you really sure they converted from our driver? Perhaps you are
mixing it up with Lars' gamedriver?

>
>One final word: I'm truly sorry that my posting turned into
>a flame right at the end. But I'm rather annoyed by the
>thought, that there now seem to be three and more versions
>of drivers developing independently. Since Lars' retirement
>noone is going to coordinate the vast amounts of improvements
>which wizards develop independently. 
Coordination is not the way to go. Evolution, revolution and copying
is.

>Since CD decided to
>reject e.g. Amylaar's codes categorically (and sorry, I don't
>believe at all that it's just because of the poor readability
>of his code)

You are correct, we don't reject Amylaars code just because of the
readability problem. We reject it because of the readability problem
in conjunction with the fact that Amylaar loves to use complex
algorithms in non-critical places and that he in several cases has
implemented things in a way that produces quite obscure bugs. 
This is not up to our standards.
Please note that we have tried his code, so we are not judging
anything blindly. 

If Amylaar changed his ways and spent some more effort on the part of
programming called documentation, we would gladly accept his code.
Unfortunately Amylaar sees no fault in his present habits, so there
are no grounds for cooperation.

The CD gamedriver contains code written by at least 20 people.
Contributions from at least 5 people outside CD have been included
since we broke off from Lars driver. I must confess that I think one
or two of them are quite ugly, but they are at least clear enough to
be fairly easy to maintain.

Doing guessing games on the meaning of "if (i == 14)" is not my kind
of fun. Finding out that it does nothing because the other end never
was implemented makes me frustrated, and knowing that a linear
algorithm would do just as well in all actual cases makes me really
annoyed.

Jacob Hallen