Re: Helping newbie coders, how much effort to put?

From: Sammy (samedi@dhc.net)
Date: 02/18/97


On Tue, 18 Feb 1997, Walter Goodwin wrote:

> > In my nearly 2 years of playing with circle, I've installed two snippets.
> > They were both things that I had spent a good bit of time trying to do on
> > my own first, but I couldn't get right.  Since then I've worked on them a
> > lot more and can write them on my own without looking at the snippets.
> 
> Out of curiousity, what were they?

The first was a colorcode mod that was given to me by Darksword (umm I
hope I got that right) of Cities of Glory.  I think it was written by
someone from another mud, but he didn't know who.  That was over a year
ago and I just couldn't do string manipulation to save my life.  I thought
I was hopeless, but now I'm much more comfortable with it.

The other was the mod to isname that was posted here way back and may be
on the snippet site.  It seemed simple enough, but I just couldn't do it
at the time.

It might be useful to note that the way I finally figured out how to do
these things (and much more complicated stuff) was learning how to make
better use of gdb.  I just wrote the code the way I thought it should be,
and used gdb to find the problems one by one till it worked.  I'm not
doing anything fancy with gdb, just using break, step, and print the way
I've posted several times.  I can't stress enough how useful gdb is in
debugging code.

"It's not just for crashes anymore."

> pick up on how to do it.   Personally I'd like to see a massive "Adopt
> an Apprentice" program be put into place :)  Where a "veteran" coder would
> adopt a newbie, and give them pointers to help em out, etc.

This is why I tell new mud imps to put away their mud idea and join the
staff of an existing mud.  Lots of muds will take on an apprentice coder
if you make an effort to show them at least a simple bit of original code.
If you're willing to learn, an experienced coder may be willing to teach
you.

Sorry, this isn't an offer.  We've already got more than our fair share of
coders :)

Sam

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