Re: failure rewriting Patchy

[David Kastrup]

Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:

> 2012/2/4 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
>> "Phil Holmes" <address@hidden> writes:
>>> what were you trying to do and what caused problems, Jan?
>
> I was trying to completely rewrite Patchy.  Graham's implementation
> seemed too complicated to me.
>
>>> I've not looked at the attached file,
>>
>> I have not looked either.
>
> Please do.  There's a readme and a file with detailed specifications
> for some procedures (algorithms written in pseudocode, step by step).
> I failed exactly at translating these algorithms to a nicely written
> Python code handling logs, exceptions etc.  Yes, it's that stupid.  I
> wrote down /how/ things should work, but failed at writing code.
> If you find contents of SPECIFICATIONS file useful, that's what i can
> do quite effectively.

That puts it out of my league.  I am not a Python programmer, so if at
all, I change badly working Python code to reasonably well-working
Python code.  But writing something from scratch in a language I don't
know anything of is not really an option for me.

> Or maybe i'm completely wrong and all of this is useless; i'm too
> upset to tell.

I could likely crossread the pseudocode and make improvements, but
without anybody turning the pseudocode into actual code, that would be
sort of pointless.

If Python is the major problem: what kind of language would you imagine
rather be doing this in?  Shell scripts and Guile are two options that
should be easily available as well.  I am not saying you should do this:
I am trying to get a feel about the toolboxes we can expect people to be
able to work with productively.

-- 
David Kastrup