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From: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.bugs
Subject: Please Don't Post Buggy/Untested Code
Message-ID: <5116@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Nov-87 11:23:14 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.5116
Posted: Tue Nov 17 11:23:14 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Nov-87 19:47:40 EST
Organization: PASS Research Group
Lines: 25
Keywords: responsibility, craftsmanship, hubris

I'm on Poskanzer's side - "first real C program" is not an excuse for shoddy
workmanship, nor is "not a hacker".  Posting it has the effect of making 
hundreds of hopeful people do Barlow's debugging for him.  By his own
admission, he ran it about "a dozen times" before distribution.  By contrast,
my own program xconq was run hundreds of times under many different conditions
before the first release, and the next release will have been run many
thousands of times under an even greater variety of conditions.  Many bugs
did not manifest themselves at first, and would have been a serious headache
to fix after release.  Even after all the testing, at least three got out
anyhow.

It is definitely in everybody's interest to discourage the posting of buggy
and untested programs.  To those who would post anyway, consider that you
are publicly advertising your software competence (or lack thereof), and that
no number of disclaimers will erase the bad impression left by bad code.

							stan shebs
							shebs@cs.utah.edu

Obligatory bug report:  the choices of terrain characters in conquest are
ridiculous.  When representing terrain, the weights of character (# pixels on)
should be taken into account - for instance, light characters such as . and ,
could be used for sea, and heavier characters like - and + and ^ for land,
and the heaviest like # and @ for features that should stand out, like cities
and volcanoes.  At present, the screen is incomprehensible.