prog: (Default)
Other than the localization problems, have well and truly broken ground with Project X and am roaring ahead, test-driven-style. This is the first time I've picked up a new programming language since getting the test-driven religion, and I have never sat more comfortably with the task. Very nice.

One of the first things I learned is that when you're not working with an interpreted language, you don't need to write tests check that return values and internal properties are the right types of things - if they every aren't, the program simply won't compile! So that's something new.

On the downside, I am not working fast enough. I wrote the previous two paragraphs at the end of last weekend, when I was feeling very much on top of things. Then one of my clients delivered a phat project they'd been speccing for months, so I said "Um, yes, money" and picked that up. A couple of days later, Wits & Wagers for XBox was released - an adaptation of a tabletop party game - and I learned that Dungeon Twister has added itself to the queue of tabletop games coming the the 360.

While I am not concerned about any other implementation of this particular game getting stolen from underneath me (it won't), I am worried about the platform getting saturated with adaptations before I can even finish my prototype. Therefore, I resolved to give myself a three-month deadline to finish it, and furthermore to work every day on the project, even if only for an hour sometimes.

That was Wednesday, and so far I have done a crappy job on the follow-through. Maybe I just need a fresh weekend to ramp things up again.
prog: (Default)
Man, nothing was bumming me out so much yesterday as learning that Randall "xkcd" Munroe publicly switched his (non-Lisp) programming allegiance from Perl to Python. I read that cartoon when it was new, but I didn't bother rolling over the alt text (I seldom do) until [livejournal.com profile] radtea made reference to it yesterday. Munroe drew the cartoon just a few months after drawing a great one that celebrated Perl (if somewhat backhandedly), so I just thought he was giving equal measure to both languages.

I don't know why I care about stuff like this, but it seems that I do. It's pragmatically meaningless to me; jobs.perl.org continues to have more postings every month than the one before, and the rare times I run into a direct challenge of Perl's authority in my professional life, I have always been able to swat it down easily. (I mean, usually they're something like "So-and-so told me that Perl is just a glue language, and it's outdated even for that. And that it's ugly and unmaintainable! He said we should use PHP instead." Hurr.)

And it's not like I'm against learning new languages. I'm picking up C# for another project, right now. (Yes, there's an overdue post there.) But switching one's home language in a particular work-area, and then flaunting it (while being an in-circles ultra-popular cartoonist), I dunno. Imagine a media personality you enjoy, and who happens to be a Red Sox fan, going onto the Daily Show to renounce the team and put on NY pinstripes while the audience cheers. (Er, also imagine that you grew up in a Boston-area sports-loving house, OK?) I feel like that. It's nothing that affects me directly, but I still feel a loss, somewhere.
prog: (Default)
Earlier this week I removed Google News from the "News" pull-down on my Safari bookmarks bar. I don't know how long it took for me to notice that visiting that page only made me angry, but I finally did, and so passes the last non-blog-or-bloglike news source I'm willing to visit when bored.



Spent all afternoon into the evening trying to grok localization techniques in Visual C# Express. All the documentation I could find is apparently for the full version of Visual Studio, which includes a command-line program for creating resource files that I apparently lack. Assuming that Microsoft doesn't feel that internationalization is a luxury reserved for people willing to buy the full IDE, I gave up and posted a plea on the MSDN forums. It's crap like this that makes me blargh at non-free development software.



Before that I dropped over $30 at Bob Slate's, and now all my loose paperwork is filed away in new folders, with new staples punched into them as appropriate. That feels good.

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