On Jun 24, 2007, at 12:27 PM, Thilo Klein wrote:

>      It seems to me as if the creators of theses codes
>      have never ever reached adulthood. And this is meant in a
>      negative way. All comments I have read in the code are totally
>      useless as they describe what everyone has already noticed.
>

Well, yeah.  An awful lot of "open source" software sucks.  The whole 
thing is subject to Sturgeon's law, and your comment about adulthood is 
probably literally true: a lot of the code you find is going to be 
someone's school project or homework assignment, or indeed some 
non-adult who thought "hey, it works!  This is cool, I'm going to post 
it on the net!" A good portion of the rest is likely to be "personal" 
code where someone thought "I'll make better comments later" and never 
got around to it, but was kind enough to make it available "as-is" 
anyway.

It's still worth more than you paid for it.


>      Look at references for python for example.

Yeah, there are some shining examples of how well open-source can work 
under ideal circumstances. Even in those areas, you get occasional 
gratuitous changes in behavior that a commercial effort could never 
have gotten away with.  (Ask me about the order of string concatenation 
vs macro expansion in the gcc preprocessor!  Grr.)


>      No playground. And I say this with conviction even though I am
>      creating a hobbiist project.

Are you going to publish YOUR project before the eyes of the cruel and 
critical world?  Great!  Then there will be one shining example of a 
perfect and well documented IR command receive routine for the rest of 
us to use.  No doubt.

BillW
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