Re: offtopic: best way of plainng overall structure of programs/functions etc.
Re: offtopic: best way of plainng overall structure of programs/functions etc.
- Subject: Re: offtopic: best way of plainng overall structure of programs/functions etc.
- From: Andrew Merenbach <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2007 07:44:56 -0700
Hi, Stephan,
I agree with Uli in that I like to write small prototype
applications, in my case often for specific features that I have yet
to implement.
For instance, I have a program called "Quotient" that displays an
extended quotient (hence its name) out to any number of decimal
places. Recently I implemented a "detector" that searches the
resultant quotient for a pattern.
In order to do this--figuring out my algorithm as I went--I might
have had to add a bunch of spaghetti code and then mixed it in with
the rest of my program, making it an unmanageable mess.
Rather than do this, I created a "Foundation Tool" (not to be
confused with a "CoreFoundation Tool"), which allowed me to use all
of the classes of Foundation--a subset of the Cocoa frameworks--which
would run as a command-line application. In this tool I implemented
as many classes as I needed to, calling them, as I say, on the
command-line.
Once I got my code worked out and cleaned up, it was easy enough just
to drop my new code into my application and--voilà!--I had no need to
mess up my code while experimenting with a new feature.
This is only a modest example, of course.
With regard to planning an application, I like to lay out a basic
interface and set up a couple of methods--not even properly named
(just something like "doStuff:" (with the full knowledge from the
Cocoa docs that I should not be writing methods that start with "do"--
but this is only temporary) and then I create some basic program
logic in this -doStuff: method. Once I have things working and I
have a few methods, I begin to separate out their functionality and I
name them more properly, as well as refine the interface to be more
than a couple of text fields and a checkbox, or whatever it is that
I've laid out before.
Cheers,
Andrew
On Aug 4, 2007, at 4:40 PM, Stephan Huebner wrote:
Hi all,
sorry, but this is not specifically about cocoa-programming, but I
don't know where else I could ask. If anyone wants to answer, it
might be better to send answers to me and not to the list.
Despite the fact that I've tried out several programming languages
over the years I have never done really big projects and most of
the time I used a mixture of trying out things in front of the
computer and planing the more complicated funtions on a piece of
paper. And most of the time it worked (to my own surprise :-). But
not always.
So, the problem ist: I've never found the perfect (or at least
elegant) way to lay out the structure of a program before sitting
on the computer. So more than once I found that the solution I
scribbled on a paper didn't work as I expected and then I sat there
in front of the computer and began to hack around until the
functions did what they should do.
The simple question is: How do the Experts do it? How do they plan
an application? Are the apps to lay out an application or objects-
structure of any use? I think there's one from the Omnigroup, but I
think I've tried it out once but did not like it enough to use it.
Or maybe I was just too impatient, who knows.
Would love to hear suggestions how to solve this problem and once
again, sorry for the offtopic.
Greetings,
Stephan Huebner
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