Programming things that amuse me.
Friday, 28 May 2010 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daA shift in work responsibilities has meant I'm suddenly working on programming projects nearly full-time (again). Today between 10am and 6pm, I:
1- made code changes to my hopeful patch to sshd (c++)
2- fixed a logic bug in a password-changing web-app (python)
3- fixed a display bug in a faculty-information web-app (php)
4- worked on a logic bug in a tool to produce faculty webpages (perl)
#1 included editing a bit of man-pages source-code, which is fairly difficult to read. But
#3 included editing .rtf source, which is quite difficult to read (nigh impossible if you aren't changing something simple, like I was; it's worse than html written by an older version of Microsoft Word. Not meant for human consumption.)
I considered editing a lisp macro for Emacs, just to add a fifth programming language, but that felt cheap.
In a nice cap to the day: we had our monthly Perl Mongers meeting, and afterward I discovered that one guy is quite experienced with the source to ssh (hacking for fun), and he's happy to be an additional set of eyes to look over my changes before I send them off to the project maintainers. Which I'm chuffed about, since I am not a strong C++ programmer. His bar tab was on me.
I was musing whether any parts of my work this week felt effortless or elegant. The python came closest: I wrote the rest of that app from scratch (in December) before I knew how exception-handling worked. Today's fix replacing an if/then with a try/except was clean, logical, quick, and most importantly, effective.
A lot of my work is push-up-my-sleeves-and-get-it-done coding, instead of big design. This summer I'm going to have to go back to two larger php projects, neither of my design. Both have some aesthetic merits, but neither feel at all elegant. Both are going to involve incremental change, though if I can, I would make the changes in a way that leaves the overall code cleaner than when I started.
I suppose what I'd like is a project that starts with elegant PHP. I'm sure it's out there somewhere.
1- made code changes to my hopeful patch to sshd (c++)
2- fixed a logic bug in a password-changing web-app (python)
3- fixed a display bug in a faculty-information web-app (php)
4- worked on a logic bug in a tool to produce faculty webpages (perl)
#1 included editing a bit of man-pages source-code, which is fairly difficult to read. But
#3 included editing .rtf source, which is quite difficult to read (nigh impossible if you aren't changing something simple, like I was; it's worse than html written by an older version of Microsoft Word. Not meant for human consumption.)
I considered editing a lisp macro for Emacs, just to add a fifth programming language, but that felt cheap.
In a nice cap to the day: we had our monthly Perl Mongers meeting, and afterward I discovered that one guy is quite experienced with the source to ssh (hacking for fun), and he's happy to be an additional set of eyes to look over my changes before I send them off to the project maintainers. Which I'm chuffed about, since I am not a strong C++ programmer. His bar tab was on me.
I was musing whether any parts of my work this week felt effortless or elegant. The python came closest: I wrote the rest of that app from scratch (in December) before I knew how exception-handling worked. Today's fix replacing an if/then with a try/except was clean, logical, quick, and most importantly, effective.
A lot of my work is push-up-my-sleeves-and-get-it-done coding, instead of big design. This summer I'm going to have to go back to two larger php projects, neither of my design. Both have some aesthetic merits, but neither feel at all elegant. Both are going to involve incremental change, though if I can, I would make the changes in a way that leaves the overall code cleaner than when I started.
I suppose what I'd like is a project that starts with elegant PHP. I'm sure it's out there somewhere.
