Just a brief response from me (Gary Campbell).
I seem to be in the opposite mode from Mr. Fish. I'm still having fun
writing the "last" version of my solver, and taking my time doing so, I
have to add. I'm encouraged by my interim results, but I have a lot
more things I want to add to it. It now solves 99.9% of games in
well under 100 moves / game, at the rate of over 300 games / second
on my Vaio laptop (about 3 years old). I still consider the player/solver
that I posted to my website a "high quality" piece of work. Check it
out and see for yourself. Visit:
http://numin8r.us/programs
About 18 years ago I was in charge of Sun Microsystem's Fortran
compiler. At that time I was extremely interested in "high quality"
software (we did use the term "industrial strength" as well as other
ways to describe it), and at that time I probably wrote a number of
fragments that might have gone together to describe my opinions
as well as those of some of my colleagues. But, now I've kind of
lost interest. Ah, well, maybe different stages of life.
----- Original Message -----
From: Shlomi Fish
To: fc-solve-discuss_at_yahoogroups.com ; Hackers-IL
Cc: Gary Campbell
Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2008 7:46 AM
Subject: RFC: "What Makes a Software High-Quality?"
Hi all!
Inspired by what Mr. Gary Capmbell (CCed to this message) wrote in a previous
message to the fc-solve-discuss list, I have written an essay on what makes a
software program "high-quality". (And by induction also Solitaire solvers.).
You can find it:
http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/high-quality-software/
A browsable HTML version is available on the directory at the bottom, but
there are other formats. I'm announcing it here for comments before I make
the document public, and publicise it.
Any comments, including silly typos are welcome. If you wish to be credited
for helping writing the document send me your desired name or psedunym, and
how to hyperlink it (homepage URL, blog URL, email, no link, etc.).
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish
http://www.shlomifish.org/
"The Human Hacking Field Guide" -
http://xrl.us/bjn8q
The bad thing about hardware is that it sometimes work and sometimes doesn't.
The good thing about software is that it's consistent: it always does not
work, and it always does not work in exactly the same way.
Received on Sun May 04 2008 - 07:15:52 IDT