I did not do much work on Freecell Solver lately. (in the past year or
so). There were many times in the past in which I believed that I've
implemented everything I could hope for in it, only to discover that there
were many things left to work on. But it's possible that that's it.
When Mark Jason Dominus[1] came to Israel as part of the
YAPC::Israel::2003 perl conference he noted that his Text::Template module
has seen quite a lot of development, but then he simply had nothing new to
implement there, so he left it as is. So people mailed him to ask if the
module was still maintained, because it has seen few recent releases.
Joel Spolsky describes a similar phenomenon in
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html. In which he
claims that for large scale commercial software, after 10 years you no
longer find anything substanially innovative to improve in the software
and you should just accept this fact.
There are some things that could be improved in Freecell Solver. As far as
I can tell, the core and the algorithms are already optimized to death,
unless someone corrects me. What would make a substantial improvement are
better scans, but I'm a bit hazy on this. I started implementing the
Patsolve's scan there (it's in the CVS HEAD), but since then lost interest
to other endeavours.
Then there are the stuff that I mention in the to-do list:
http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/freecell-solver/to-do.html
Some of them seem quite exciting, but to me, it seems they will make
little difference to the end user. (except perhaps the porting to Java)
Freecell Solver was not abandoned yet. I still intend to correct bugs,
and answer users' questions. But it seems to be suitable for the needs of
most people, so I can't guarantee I'll do anything substantial with the
codebase.
If you, on the other hand, are or happen to know a competent C
programmer, who wishes to learn more about FCS and get his feet wet,
please let me know. Any contributions (as patches) will be very welcome,
and I'll even give CVS access if you are very persistent at them.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
[1] -
http://perl.plover.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish shlomif_at_vipe.technion.ac.il
Home Page:
http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
An apple a day will keep a doctor away. Two apples a day will keep two
doctors away.
Falk Fish
Received on Mon Dec 01 2003 - 07:09:44 IST