glx2

[Peter M. Brigham]

Rewriting old code that works is extraordinarily time and labor intensive and always introduces new bugs that have to be squashed. My main project is, like yours, huge, 36,000 lines of script, 45 substacks. It's ugly in places, and I'd do much of it differently now that I've learned a few things, but it just works. I've tried to clean up the worst of the spaghetti, but only in limited ways, because chasing strands down that interweave with other modules gets very complex. I tried to port it to newer LC versions and take advantage of the expanded engine and language capabilities, and no doubt it would benefit enormously once I did that, but the time it would take would be completely prohibitive. Not to mention the time lost from my paying job because of chasing down new species of bugs. So I run it in an an increasingly antique version of LC, but it does what I need it to amazingly well.

I recall reading that the NASA software for the Apollo flights was used unchanged for 20 years because no one wanted to tinker with a million lines of machine code that had been already exhaustively tested in the real world -- because the bottom line was that it had to really really really work without error every time or people would die.

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig


On Oct 30, 2015, at 5:38 AM, Kay C Lan wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 12:25 PM, Mark Wieder <mwieder at ahsoftware.net>
> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 6.6.5? Really?
>> That was so buggy I uninstalled it right after installation.
>> 
> 
> Hhmmm, interesting. 6.6.5 is rock solid for me on OS X 10.4.x, 10.5.x and
> 10.9.x. In the case of Tiger and Leo that's even on some old PPC machines.
> 
> Most new stuff I do in LC7, anything quick and dirty I'm using LC8 more and
> more, but my biggest project is well and truly 6.6.5. I'm going to upgrade
> it to LC7 tomorrow but thankfully tomorrow never comes ;-) The code dates
> back to HC, when I knew nothing, and then progressed through the time that
> I thought I knew something; which was really dangerous! Most people's pride
> and joy is the result of a bottle of wine and good cheese; my 'baby' is a
> cat skinning exercise gone horribly wrong. Honestly the 'thing' is a
> Frankenstein of code and parts* that has been hobbled together as I've
> convinced myself that I know what I'm doing. Realistically it shouldn't
> work - the fact it does is a testament to xTalk and the genius of Bill
> Atkinson and those who've carried on that vision.
> 
> Very grateful to the LC Team for making 6.6.5 for those of us with working
> antiques.
> 
> NOT suggesting that you have to do the same :-) GLX2 is open source right,
> so people are free to fix it to meet their requirements.
> 
> * It started out as single Stack, multi-Card format and worked on files
> that I downloaded and preprocessed using various other programs. It then
> morphed into a front-end to a mySQL DB with a single Card Main Stack and
> multiple single Card Sub-Stacks adding AppleScript and Shell to auto
> include the preprocessing and now it talks... to the Internet directly.
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