Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 23:08:52 10/29/99
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On October 30, 1999 at 01:59:29, Will Singleton wrote: [snip] >Dann, > >I don't think *your* position is strange at all. :) I understand your >arguments, and I think they have a lot of merit. So, try to understand mine. > >Programming can be considered an art as well as a science. While the basic >ideas are not too hard to learn, to do it very well takes an exceptional person. > When you publish the source to an exceptionally fine work, you can >short-circuit the creative process in others. Not always, and not with all >people, but it happens. You present the opportunity to avoid the work that >otherwise would have led to real understanding, and perhaps independent >advancement. > >When you say that it is trivial to translate pseudo-code, that may be more true >for you than me. Nonetheless, doing so assumes that you have something of your >own to translate it into. Why would you spend the time writing your own program >when you could just study Crafty and be happy? OK. I think I am finally beginning to understand where you are coming from. But a flaw like you mention is in the one who did not put forth the effort to understand in the first place. I don't think that studying anything will make knowlege stop. Rather, the opposite is true. If I do *not* study the code but just try and use it that would be unfullfilling and a stupid bore. I would never bother to even attempt it because: 0. Fraught with error 1. Nothing is gained 2. Reeks of plaguiarism For me, source code is a source of information. As I have said before, I would actually prefer a tremendously lucid explanation of the concept at hand (Ala Knuth or Sedgewick) but I find that such information is hard to come by. Also, I like to examine what others have tried and see the brilliancies in their code. Crafty code and Phalanx code is *pretty* to look at. The new version of GNU chess is pretty nice too. For me, beautiful code is like a beautiful painting. But I won't just blindly use something. I'm too much of a worry wort to try to use something I don't understand. That is one reason that I move so slowly. If I just wanted to hack/copy crafty or phalanx, I could have been "done" two years ago. As it is, I only have bits and pieces and fragments of algorithms. I am trying to model the framework in my mind before I even put it together. And I am definitely going to do some things that I am fairly sure that no one else is doing. I have even talked about some of them before.
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