Although I haven't been writing about it lately, I have been plugging away at jSuneido.
Once I could run the IDE (more or less) from jSuneido I could run the stdlib tests. Many of which, of course, failed.
So I've been fixing bugs, gradually getting tests to pass.
On a good day it's tedious and unglamorous. Any satisfaction from getting one test to pass is almost immediately extinguished as you move on to the next failing one. It's depressing being forced to confront all your screwups, one after another, for days on end.
On a bad day, like today, it's incredibly frustrating. I had the distinct urge to smash something, and honestly, I'm not usually the kind of person that wants to smash things.
It seemed like everything I touched broke umpteen other things. Things that used to work no longer worked. Eclipse wasn't working right, Parallels wasn't working right, my brain wasn't working right.
If it was someone else's code I could curse them and fantasize about how much better it would be if I had written it. But when it's your own code, and you've just finished rewriting it, the only conclusion you can draw is that you're an idiot!
The actually bugs, once I found them, haven't been major. Just stupid things like off by one errors. Quick, is Java Calendar MONTH zero based or one based? Many of them are incompatibilities between cSuneido and jSuneido (which is why my jSuneido tests didn't catch them).
Some of the date code worked in the morning but not in the afternoon. WTF! Guess what, Java Calendar HOUR is 12 hour, for 24 hour you need to use HOUR_OF_DAY. Argh! RTFM
I have about 20 tests still failing. Hopefully it won't take too many more days to clean them up.
2 comments:
Well, if you didn't get mad then it would mean that you didn't care and if you didn't care, what would be the point!?! Seeing you smash something would definitely be different, and kinda scary!
Don't smash anything. That was how I worked and it never got me anywhere.
Keep up the good work. This is the sort of slogging that can be depressing all right, but I know you and you're learning a ton at the same time.
It's kind of the opposite of climbing in a way: After the summit it's usually easier. In programming, the "approach" slog always comes after the fun problem is solved.
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