From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jan 17 10:22:22 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (dsl-64-192-6-133.telocity.com [64.192.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 6742037B405 for ; Thu, 17 Jan 2002 10:22:10 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 39801 invoked by uid 100); 17 Jan 2002 18:22:08 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15431.5711.715952.313252@guru.mired.org> Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2002 12:22:07 -0600 To: "Anthony Atkielski" Cc: "FreeBSD Questions" Subject: Re: USB CF reader (SanDisk) epilog In-Reply-To: <015701c19f32$1d330a70$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <15428.34332.870130.2946@guru.mired.org> <00cc01c19e06$8dafddf0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15428.38970.224790.33804@guru.mired.org> <00ee01c19e0d$4c518960$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15428.53337.168408.720031@guru.mired.org> <01b301c19e55$f11330a0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15429.45776.491932.646543@guru.mired.org> <007201c19ed4$e98bc070$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15430.11292.89340.470262@guru.mired.org> <015701c19f32$1d330a70$0a00000a@atkielski.com> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ From: "Mike Meyer" X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.44 (Python 2.2; freebsd-4.4-STABLE-i386) Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Anthony Atkielski types: > Mike writes: > > All the information on how the software works > > is contained in the code. > Similarly, a core dump of the software will tell you exactly how it works, > too, but here again, it is not practical to try to learn how a program works > by reading machine language in a core dump, despite the theoretical (and > actual) 100% completeness of what the dump contains. Actually, a core dump won't tell you how anything works, unless you've got a description of the hardware as well. Even then, source code is much easier to read. > > As to writing readable code, there are two > > approaches that have proven successful. > The only approach I've seen that works is hiring highly competent > programmers. And that failed to be become popular for the same reasons - the internal quality of the code isn't seen by the user, and has no bearing on sales. So money spent on it is wasted when it comes to sales. > Object-oriented programming What Meyer describes includes a lot of things that document what the code should be doing that didn't make it into most popular OO languages. If you haven't read his book and do OO programming, you're missing half the value of the technic. > > The web is not the code. > The Web is more cost-effective than an examination of tens of thousands of > lines of code, and the code will not tell me everything I'd need to know > (such as how the USB standard works). Since you didn't find anything, the web had a value of 0 and a cost of hours. That's makes it as cost effective as staring at the wall. Reading the code carefully is more cost effective than that. > > cd /usr/src/sys; find . -name '*.[ch]' | xargs > > grep -l