Jason Mitchell - 2003-04-14

The plan for this week was spring cleaning and getting my old 2d code to work in Linux. As I write this now, I haven't finsihed the 2D part, but the code for the most part is cleaned up.

Doing all of this today, at least the cleaning up part is as boring as can be. The majority of my work consisted of replacing old names and varibles with new ones, and removing uneeded code.  I don't know how many times I pressed Alt-% in xemacs.

There are a few thoughts about programming that occured to me:

1. cvs is great, but using it shows how wishy washy I am. For example, earlier today I deleted my old main.cpp files becase I decided that they could be rewritten better. Hours later, when I finished fixing the old .h files, I was ready to start the main.cpp file. Once my mind realized that meant rewriting a bunch of code I had just deleted, it began to throttle me. I passed out, and when I woke up, the old main.cpp files were back.

2. Listening to Microsoft makes you a bad programmer. There are few that believe in Hungarian Notation. I am no longer one of them. No real reason why, I do see the usefulness of it, but having varibles like m_pgltxtrGLTexture compared to just glTexture does a lot to improve the flow of chi through the code. Feng Shui: It's not just for rooms anymore.

Also, Microsoft seems to have no qualms about putting C++ code in .h files. XEmacs doesn't like this, and XEmacs is my new god, therefore I had to change them.

Essentially, getting rid of all the silliness that I had from Microsoft made my code look a hell of a lot better in my opinion, but I do not know at what cost of readability.

3. I don't know very much about the reality of coding. Oh, I know the language pretty well, but as far as dealing with cvs, gcc, and all that, I'm lost. This is also due to me doing a good amount of coding with Microsoft Visual Studio, but it has more to do with how I learned programing. Oh well, that's one of the reasons I took this course.

So that's all I really can think of for this week. The .cpp files I have right now are not working. The big accomplishment this week was the .hh files, and none of that is really new code.

I've worked about 6 hours today (from 7 PM to 3 AM with copious breaks), and I might work a bit more, but right now, I'm planning to take a LONG break.

I do know one thing however, thank God I did not need to start from scratch.