Author: Ren Wu
Date: 09:23:05 01/26/99
Go up one level in this thread
On January 26, 1999 at 09:33:36, Robert Hyatt wrote: >This is a basic tenet of software engineering called 'code reuse'. Why should >I pay you to write something from scratch and take a year, if you can take >something that exists and modify it to do the same thing in a month? And then >I don't have as much trouble debugging and testing, since it is mostly already >done... Yes, I agree that code resue is very important, and two good examples are STL and MFC's ole support. But my point here was that for beginners who want to really programming, encourage them to write from scratch is generally a good idea. One has to be ready when one day he need a special wheel and there is nothing similiar existed. Even in software engineering, it is a real pain if someone else's wheel is broken and you have to fixed it. What i didn't said above is that sometimes my fellow programmers will still try to find something to based on, even when faced a simple task. So for ther beginners, I think it is better to present ideas and let them to try those ideas by themselfs. And for experience programmers, i don't want to see one day someone enter his program to an tournament, and he has done pecfect software engineering, achive 100% code resue of Crafty source. :) >that's not a bad side to this... Of course occasionally starting over is a good >thing. But not starting from 'scratch'. IE if you don't know what has already >been tried, you will re-invent the same bad wheels over and over and probably >follow the same footsteps many before you did... software engineering wants to >avoid that 'reinvention' problem... For chess, any idea is worth tring. And this is what i mean sometime the beginner will be bound by crafty's source. Because he will think "Oh, Bob has try this and didn't work well, so it much be bad", or " It works so well in Crafty, it must be good", Or "I never see Bob did this in crafty, it mush be unsound" and so on. And for competition side, I think it is the competition which stimulate computer chess's advance, at least for the early days. But if everyone enter their own reused crafty clones, the tournaments become little attractive. Even youself feel uncomfortable about this. And it is hard for the tournament organizers too, how do they know if a program is a orignal, and other is a crafty clone? How do they to convinced the sponser that his tournament is not a "Crafty tournament"? I should say that I respect you very much, here just some of my thoughts. Ren.
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.