Up to Main Index                              Up to Journal for July, 2019

                      JOURNAL FOR SUNDAY 28TH JULY, 2019
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: A lack of inspiration
   DATE: Sun 28 Jul 19:40:31 BST 2019

It has been a slow week or so since I last wrote anything for the journal.
Mainly because I had nothing much to say. Weather has been stupidly hot with
temperatures going over 30°C. Anything over 22-23°C and it makes me very
sluggish and tired all the time. Not ideal when trying to program. When I have
been programming I've been writing tests for the existing PUT command before
replacing the PUT command with a new implementation using the new matcher.

I'm still unhappy with the current command tests. Commands are very high level
and a lot goes on behind the scenes. Since realising I was trying to test the
wrong things a while ago[1] things have improved somewhat. However the amount
of code I've been writing for tests still seems disproportionate to the amount
of code I am testing! Case in point: put.go 110 lines, put_test.go 300 lines
and not finished yet.

Code working? Yes✓ Do tests work and pass? Yes✓ Am I happy? No[2] :( *sigh*

Because I'm unhappy with the code I just end up poking at it, making little
progress, hoping for some flash of inspiration. I could just push testing to
the side for now and work on something more fun, telling myself I'll come back
to it later. That would be a lie, just postponing testing to probably never :(
I've tried reading through the Go sources for inspiration, I've Googled, I've
done a lot of reading — no inspiration yet. For now I'll just continue to plod
on, hoping something will ignite that tiny spark I need.

I have pushed out two minor changes to the public dev branch that dropped out
of the tests for PUT. You can no longer PUT items 'into' another player. As
players have an inventory they were treated as containers. This meant you
could 'PUT <item> <player>' and the target player would have the item put into
their inventory. At some point a GIVE command will be added that will ask the
target player if they want to accept the item or not. The other change is a
very minor tweak to the message emitted by the PUT command when you try
putting an item inside itself.

Now if only I could pull myself out of this fug I'm stuck in…

--
Diddymus

  [1] Journal for Monday 10th June, 2019 - An update on WolfMUD & the
      importance of testing the right things: ../6/10.html

  [2] There are other reasons I'm not happy right now. The new generics
      proposal for Go[3], the way modules are being pushed. What happened to
      Java seems to be happening all over again.

  [3] Updated Go generics proposal:
      https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draft-contracts.md


  Up to Main Index                              Up to Journal for July, 2019