Archive for March 18th, 2009

function coder to a class coder

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

The first lines of code I wrote we all sequentially written, you read about functions and after functions you come to OOP, Object Orientated Programming ie. Classes.  Each step along the way it seems so hard to evolve but when you get the hang of functions and their properties, you can not imagine how you managed to code with out them.   Most of my code is grouped into functions and have files that group many functions together.  I guess instead of files I could be using classes now?   I read that class are a good way of spawning multiple occasions of the same bit of code but for different data inputs.  Again like moving to functions, there are a whole new set of properties to understand about writing Classes.  Each class instant is called an Object (straight for the text book speak).  The code quickly looses that familiar look but with that we get many new benefits, technical and maintenance and I expect with time this will all look ‘normal’ again.

It is not that I do not  use many classes right now but these are mainly opensource files I have imported.  Creating my classes is the new frontier.

open sourcing code for a beginner

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

I am preparing to open source the code I have been writing for mepath.com .   The hardest work has been figuring out a logic that allow a machine to ‘understand’ context of the text that has been authored.  However, preparing the code for release is proving real hard too.  Completely new, you soon pick up on words like SVN or GIT but I never read you need a local client and a hosting service.  Well, the sites do say that but say it clearly in geek speak.  I contrast that wth the current ease of ftp – ing the files up to hosting account.  OK, no version control except human and backups done well, occationally but the opportunity to share is missing.   The opportunity to share is the goal, if others do not have a chance to see and read about the goals you want to achieve, then it is highly unlikely they will get involved.  I have been pointed to this book .  I am doing my best to learn from it.  Hopefully I will write soon about where the code is hosted, that is if you are interested in the lifestyle linking vision code we are figuring out.