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  • I've seen someone code that way. Not since high school, but that's a way that some people think coding works when they start out writing code.

    This person was trying to write a game in (trigger warning: nostalgia) QBasic and had it drawing kindof a Pacman kind of character. And in pseudocode basically what he was doing was:

     
        
    // Draw character with mouth open at (100, 100)
    moveCursorTo(100, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(116, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(108, 108)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(116, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(100, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(100, 100)
    
    // Wait for half a second.
    sleepSeconds(0.5)
    
    // Draw character with mouth closed at (101, 100)
    moveCursorTo(101, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(109, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(117, 108)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(109, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(101, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(101, 100)
    
    // Wait for half a second.
    sleepSeconds(0.5)
    
    // Draw character with mouth open at (102, 100)
    moveCursorTo(102, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(118, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(110, 108)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(118, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(110, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(102, 100)
    
    // Wait for half a second.
    sleepSeconds(0.5)
    
    ...
    
      

    He hadn't gotten to the point of working in user controls. (Like "change direction to 'up' when user presses the 'up' key" or whatever.) And understandably had no idea how that would work if/when he got that far.

  • Reminds me of when I downloaded Tic Tac Toe for my graphing calculator in high school. It wasn't this verbose, but the original author copy pasted the logic for each turn. Even I knew this was awful, so I refactored it to use a loop.

  • what if you write an algorithm that will produce the necessary code for each possible move, so you don't have to type them all manually

  • Reminds me of my lottery number randomizer in VB 3.0 I calculated 10 rows and checked each input box against the others without any loops, and then each row was just copy pasted. 🤦

47 comments