Re: Game announcements on LGDC

[Bert Peers <rat@larian.com>]

Brad Johnson wrote:

> > So should we exclude a listing because it's loops have no comments, and only
> > variables called i, j and k indexing into x [] and t [] ?  The author may
> > come back asking "What are you talking about ?  That code is trivial !"...
>         Well, what we could do is have a reviewer of sorts add comments into
> some of the source as a kind of tutorial. Pointing out what is actually a
> really good idea, or criticizing bad ideas like cryptic typedefs and bad
> function names.

Yes, that would be the ideal solution, but who is going to do that ?
It will be a *lot* of work.  You'll hardly get any assistance from the
compiler, the amount of code to be verified may be overwhelming,
and the fact that every reviewer will inevitably have his own set
of rules and guidelines (see below) might lead to "political issues".
I mean, not that we'll ever get to that kind of scale anytime soon,
but imagine that this was a linux gui, not game, dev center.  Can you
imagine the effects of someone giving negative comments on KDE
and praising the code of GNOME ?...  More to the point, how bout
"CS vs MESA", "PPlay vs Clanlib", .. ?..

>         As another point, there's also a limit to how readable a program
> should be. Function names should be descriptive, but sometimes it gets to the
> point where it becomes a chore just to type out the whole function call. This
> is one of my pet peeves when dealing with libraries, such as Imlib and
> function names like gdk_imlib_get_image_shape();

See, it's already starting.  I luuuuuuv long function names.  I don't care
if a function is 60 characters long and takes 14 parameters of 7 different
types.  I got VC++ with autocompletion, drop down lists, and tooltip
reminders of the parameter's type and name.  To someone who doesn't
have this kind of advanced IDE my interfaces must be a disaster, enough
to give negative comments in a LGDC submission review.  Obviously
I'd disagree, pointing out that this is exactly a plus, making it as readable
as a newspaper.
  Oh well.  This could probably go on forever :)  I'll just say that I support
the idea of barring Bad Code from the site, but I want to stay as far away
as possible from the actual labeling of submissions.

Bert
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-=<Short Controlled Bursts>=-