I'll just jot down here those thoughts that occur when working on Textual DXiner, Visual DXiner and SGI Generators.

There's nothing outstanding here. Most of my stuff is naive. Revisiting oldschool notions.

I do stuff I find is really amazing to find the rest of the world had it 10 years ago! That's the story of my life such as it is. I make an exerted effort to not stand on the shoulders of giants.

A classic example being ... I had "intellesense" in a previous version of Visual DXiner back in 2006 ... but because I didn't get around to finishing the project, it didn't get out there ... 11 years has gone by and I still haven't finished it. Nowadays, even your simple text editor is crap because you doesn't have it!

The world moves on ... and I don't have the time or the energy to move with it.

I was the original Betamax man. Betamax was a far superior system to VHS ... but the world went VHS. I loved HD-DVD ... which was the simpler, more robust system that didn't have a "regioning" system, it arrived on the market earlier and when Blu-Ray came out the software was MUCH superior. The world went Blu-Ray!

In software too ... UML, the UNIVERSAL modelling language, an overly complex description system that models everything (including the kitchen sink) has taken off. What's needed is a simpler, more consistent, more consice and convenient software oriented modelling system. But the world is too UML crazy to care that I have one. Because of the effort involved, those that know anything about it become to snobby to look at anything else.

The lines I hear the most must be ...

• "You don't have this! UML does!", 
• "I can't be bothered with it, it's not UML!",
• "Why didn't you write UML instead?"
• "Why don't you just use ... Eclipse/Enterprise? Architect/Whizzo?-Tool?"
• "What's the point in writing another unheard of design tool?"

There are no satisfactory answers to these questions/statements. Those who have never created something more complex or mind taxing than paper hat, on their own initiative really can't comment (and that means not paid for by work or told to do it or doing it because it gets you laid,) however they seem to think that it's OK telling you where you're going wrong and what you should do is and really aren't prepared to walk even a yard in your intellectual shoes.

Enjoy what's here. I spent many happy hour doing it. I'm sure that you too could benefit from it, even as an example of how NOT to do it. I also spent many frustrated hour too, because though this is a great project, I can't make enough money from it to live.

C'est la vie.

Archibald

That is, unless you're good at it, or you're popular and software engineers are rarely either ... and never both.

The kind of people I usually meet are opinionated or mercenary and have that "not invented here" attitude - Or even an "if you invented it then it can't be any good" vibe. Sometimes they're one of those "What you should do" types - who are keen to offer advice that only works in their world; they would never do anything as radical as do something about it and if they did it wouldn't be appropriate anyway. Or at the very best ... "I work this way, I know what I likes and likes what I know" ... and very very occasionally "I'm too old to change", which is a very passive aggressive kind of excuse saying - really I can't be bothered with this. The worst kind must be those who offer (out of politeness or temporary enthusiasm) and then don't actually do anything and leave you in the lurch.

But in general it's the old "opinions are like arseholes" thing ... Everybody has one but never wants to even sniff at anybody else's.

Well, I've been software engineering in 'C' for a fair few years. It's very old fashioned nowadays. But I still program in C (using vi/gvim mainly) and I can often out code (not in terms of speed, but quality) many practitioners because I've bundled the "algorithmic patterns" experience of all my closest engineer friends and designed a method similar yet unlike the most common but inappropriate tools to help me write bullet proof code in a short a time as possible.

I can and do program in other languages ... but none are as fast when designing big systems and few produce code that is so robust.

I present snippets of it on this site. You can either benefit from it ... or ignore it.

It's up to you!

Archibald