Walter's annoying habits

[Stewart Gordon]

Thank you for being the first to take my post seriously.

Kenny Bentley wrote:
> I have been using D for over a year now (maybe 2), some in commercial 
> projects and some not in commercial projects. I think the release 
> schedule that Walter maintains is pretty impressive. Honestly I don't 
> know how he stays so focused on the language. I quickly tire out on 
> things I'm working on if I work too much on it.

Indeed.  I lose count of the projects I've tired of in my time and not 
got back into for a while.

> Sure I think every programmer has annoying habits. (in fact, one of 
> my annoying habits is that I insist on using a language -- D -- which 
> makes it difficult for us to hire more programmers.)

Does your company provide on-the-job training?  What are your entry 
requirements?

> I have other annoying habits too, like deleting other programmers 
> code because I didn't like how it looked, or saying the  project will 
> be done in 1 day and it takes me a week... oh well... no one is 
> perfect.

Indeed.  But sometimes people are just careless.  While some of my 
points may well be just human error, I'm quite sure some of the habits 
are kickable with not too much effort.

> Of all of the ideas you posted, I think that the only one that has 
> validity is the not integrating patches others have written. He does 
> from time to time, but not always, and I understand why too... I have 
> idiot programmers that I work with, and I LOATHE when they have a new 
> patch for me to integrate, because they never get my formatting 
> correct, they leave retarded comments ("this is the x variable!!!") 
> and generally cruft up my code...

Yes, some people do write silly comments.  During my PhD I found 
something like this in the Fortran code used by my department:

#ifdef PARALLEL
! INITIALIZE MPI IF 'PARALLEL' HAS BEEN DEFINED
     CALL INITIALIZE_MPI
#endif

> The thing that pisses me off the most is when they use isFriend when 
> I'm using is_friend... or they even go so far as to write it in 
> spanish esAmigo. I don't integrate that crap no matter what they 
> say... I rewrite it, and when I rewrite it, I often find they 
> implemented it quickly and didn't think about the future of the 
> feature and it usually has bugs... I don't know if that's the case 
> for walter, but I understand completely.

But do you ever look at the code they write to see if they've got _good_ 
ideas on how to implement it?

> Walter is one man though, so he may start integrating more patches in 
> the future as the language grows. It's hard for me to lose control of 
> something I wrote over 90% of, and I'm sure walter feels the same way 
> -- so I'm sure it will be on his own time he integrates the patches.

Being in control doesn't have to mean doing it practically on your own. 
   You don't need too many cooks to spoil the broth - too few cooks work 
just as well.

> Just thought I'd throw my ideas out there. I really enjoy the 
> language of D, and I didn't really get to express my gratitude much 
> other ways...
> 
> Thanks Walter, I've loved almost every bit of D so far, and it's 
> definitely my preferred language.

Same here.  It's just those odd bits of it that stick out like sore thumbs.

Stewart.