What is on Your Mind?

Well, like you guys, I write a lot of code, and have a lot of sites, passwords, scripts, etc across many sites.. a lot of IT.

Even the best written code can be hard to understand after we have not touched it for a month or two, let alone a year or more.

So, I learned the hard way many years ago not to write "fancy one liners" and write well documented code and scripts.

Maybe I am being too simple here; but when I was a young lad my mother used to say 'Neo (well, not really Neo... haha), always put things back where you keep them in the same place, that way when you need them again, you don't waste time looking for it"..... and that is what I do not, even thought I never did it when I was young, of course!

The same is true with code... but the twist is different... always make sure your code is easy to read and self documenting as possible (clear variable names, simple clear logic etc, not fancy one-liners) because when we need to go back and work on that code again, we don't want to waste time trying to understand what we did before......

... and my mom would be proud of me, I always put my tools back in the toolbox now, always put my scissors back in the same place, always put my car and motorcycle keys in the same place after I use them.... and so my life is so easy as I never waste time trying to find that stuff anymore. LOL

Just keep it simple and life will be easy and less stress, and we then have more time for other things that are more fun.... that is my view.

When I started out on unix.com, I was awestruck by the ultra-compressed one-liners from the clever guys (Scrutinizer, you were my hero!!!). Over time, I learned from you guys and started doling out some good (I believe ) one-liners myself.

I viewed one-liners as a way to test my knowledge and bring in some supposedly esoteric features of the tool into the solution. But, now I realize that the people who will actually use that solution will hardly appreciate (or be able to) the "art". Also, the "compression" will only confuse myself some time in the future! So, it's better to make a trade-off somewhere...

Yeah... my view is that if you want (generally) "one liner" for a more complex task or expression, but it in a file and save it; and execute the script.

Of course, to each his own, and I'm not saying others should not be creative; I'm only saying that my experience is that I have so much code to manage, some from 10 years ago, and "elegant" or "fancy" one liners are hard to understand years after writing them, at least for me.

Anyway, I'm always going back and looking a legacy HTML and PHP and other admin scripts for this site and all the backup sites, etc. I try to keep is very clean, easy to understand, because with a site like this; you could be out have wine with friends and need to come back to the desk to fix a problem!

But I still use the unix pipeline for command line tasks, but nothing fancy or that I would keep for sysadmin.

Anyway, maybe I misunderstood the post or the intention here... which is possible since I have been coding like crazy lately!!

LOL

People figure they should be able to type 19 characters and solve a problem, after all, UNIX has everything right? Of course it's seldom that easy.

Well, Windoze is just "Right-click it" so why not?

Hi Neo...
Yup, I often do a search for something and come across an upload I have written and totally forgotten about. I read it and think did I actaully write that?
Going slightly off topic here with the second quote I was on a Python ML, (they were so obnoxious that I have long since left), and the big guns on there said there was no need to add comments as it was easy to work out what a python script does. I gave them this challenge:-
(Before reading the answer I wonder if the Python experts on here can work out what it does?)

Code:

# SomeSound.py

audio=file('/dev/dsp', 'wb')
def main():
	for a in range(0,25,1):
		for b in range(15,112,1):
			for c in range(0,1,1):
				audio.write(chr(127+b)+chr(127+b)+chr(127+b)+chr(127+b)+chr(127-b)+chr(127-b)+chr(127-b)+chr(127-b))
		for b in range(112,15,-1):
			for c in range(0,1,1):
				audio.write(chr(127+b)+chr(127+b)+chr(127+b)+chr(127+b)+chr(127-b)+chr(127-b)+chr(127-b)+chr(127-b))
main()
audio.close()

The solution is here:-
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