www.linusakesson.net

Interesting essay with some valid points, but the context lacks depth: it is one thing to do this because it is a hobby, quite another if one must walk the very delicate line of writing code easy to debug in consideration of others, because one is an entrepreneur, racing against the clock. "When are we going to ship?"

You are probably privy to the Zen of "software is done when it is done!", which means that writing quality code must necessarily avoid cleverness in favor of maintainability: if one is an entrepreneur, one must eventually ship, or the startup will bust.

Rule of clarity: clarity is better than cleverness

"Because maintenance is so important and so expensive, write programs as if the most important communication they do is not to the computer that executes them but to the human beings who will read and maintain the source code in the future (including yourself)."

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2877610

Rule of representation: fold knowledge into data, so program logic can be stupid and robust

"Even the simplest procedural logic is hard for humans to verify, but quite complex data structures are fairly easy to model and reason about. To see this, compare the expressiveness and explanatory power of a diagram of (say) a fifty-node pointer tree with a flowchart of a fifty-line program. Or, compare an array initializer expressing a conversion table with an equivalent switch statement. The difference in transparency and clarity is dramatic."

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2878263

Anonymous
Sun 5-May-2013 19:53

I would also like to leave you to think about the following:

anyone can write clever code; anyone can write complex code; anyone can over-complicate...

...but if you are really, really smart, make a complex thing simple! Can you go the other way, can you effectively simplify complex things? That is true smarts, because it is incredibly hard to do, and requires one to be extremely smart, knowledgeable, and experienced. Not very many people can do it, even among the smart.

Gravazoid

phf
Martin Schulte
Tue 7-May-2013 13:54

Great! Do you consider releasing the soundtrack?

Sidreloc

Anonymous
Wed 8-May-2013 18:40

Rather than parsing the replay routine and doing all this analysis, would it not have been cheaper to just extract the data, and write one's own replay routine?

I mean, most of the $1000-$1003 tunes were made in a limited set of music programs, were they not? And $1800 tunes, there is only one culprit, Future Composer, whose format should be well understood, well enough to construct one's own relocatable replay routine (if using Future Composer's own relocation capabilities is not desired). That should cover 90% of tunes out there, should it not?

Anonymous
Wed 8-May-2013 18:44

What C=64 code really needs is support for executable and linking format ("ELF"). Writing ELF headers from Turbo Assembler is no problem, but something should be able to read and parse the global offset table ("GOT"), which is exactly what is needed here for all these SID tunes (not the data itself, of course, but for a truly relocatable replay routine).

So maybe a little "shim" routine which would act as the runtime linker for dynamic objects, ld.so.1?

Hmmm, that might be a cool next project for me to implement, hmmmmm...

A Chipful of Love For You

Anonymous
Thu 9-May-2013 01:11

Wow, that sounds great!

The hardware chiptune project

Anonymous
Sun 12-May-2013 11:33

Greetings from Aus.

The Hardware Chiptune Project is a work of Genuis!

I love your work and your website; I do hope you make other tunes with a similar orchestration in terms of the waveforms used. I hope to build something like this myself when I get the time. You're an inspiration!

Gravazoid

Anonymous
Mon 13-May-2013 01:52

The soundtrack is released, in that it's part of the (released) source code (see sfx.c).
A pre-rendered MP3 would indeed be nice, I you meant that. --jn

Anonymous
Mon 13-May-2013 12:25

The soundtrack is released, in that it's part of the (released) source code (see sfx.c).
A pre-rendered MP3 would indeed be nice, I you meant that. --jn

Yes, that's what I meant. :)

Rasp64

Anonymous
Wed 15-May-2013 23:44

That's awesome work there!
Just wondering, are you going to open up some of the guts of your build?
I would really like to tinker around with it, but am clearly lacking the skills to pull this off :(

A case against syntax highlighting

HoltomS
Stephen Holtom
Fri 17-May-2013 11:40

In addition to the points mentioned above, I'd like to point out that some skimming is *good*.

For example, say a string literal is being passed in a function call. In essence, there are two bits of information for a programmer to be aware of:

1. A string literal is being passed
2. The contents of the string

Now, it is *right* that those things can be considered separately. It's right that I can saccade past the contents of the string if right now I'm not interested in that argument, and need to examine another argument to the function more closely.

It is wrong to be forced every time to track my eyes across carefully, and find the closing quote, before I can look at the next argument to the function. These little inefficiencies add up.

The analogy with a novel is false. A novel must be read in a linear fashion. For most modern code paradigms it's not even clear what linear would mean (a source file, a stack trace, an inheritance hierarchy?). Furthermore the English language does not have the same kind of formal syntactic structures as code: function calls, literals, operators, macros etc are not merely different kinds of words.

The TTY demystified

Anonymous
Sat 18-May-2013 11:57

So much for the 'age of information'.

Well, it is the age of information. Noone said it was the age of wisdom.

Anonymous
Sat 18-May-2013 12:08

"yes" program , produced in 2009 !

Thank you David McKenzie for your contribution to open source community !

I am just wondering what in your background that enabled the FSF to accept such worthless contribution ?

Member of what masonic lodge or what church or son of a war hero or billonarties you have to be so they accept that piece of crap ?

For reference:

yes command - otputs a line on tty until killed !

coded and added to Linux in 2009.

Actually, "yes", which is part of GNU coreutils, has been around since, like forever, being an implementation of the same-named Unix command.

David MacKenzie is the author of many of coreutils' commands, including chgrp, chmod, chown, date, dirname, expand, fold, ginstall, groups, head, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, nice, printenv, printf, rmdir, stty, su, tty, uname, unexpand, and obviously yes; and is co-author of many others. But he is probably best known for autotools, which is one of the most central pieces of free software, as any distribution maintainer could tell you.

Now, what have YOU done for GNU or Linux or free software?

Spindle

Anonymous
Sat 18-May-2013 23:01

Very well done!

chipxsd
Klemen Verdnik
Wed 22-May-2013 10:52

you're one crazy sonofabitch! :) that's one hell of a job you did there. I can't wait to see the fluidity of other demos using this tool.

And the example demo you provided is also cute (music, plasma and the morphing logo).

I really like coming to your site, you really amaze me :) Any chance you'll be playing around with Propeller II, when it comes out (or with the FPGA version)?

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