Older blog entries for dennissheil (starting at number 0)

5 Oct 2008 (updated 28 Aug 2009 at 02:06 UTC) »

Doing Perl programming. I am usually in a rush to do what I want so my usual practice is to throw everything together and just get it working, and then do cleanup later. Sometimes the cleanup is necessitated by things breaking, like it is now. This code interacts on the Internet, and as remote servers are always changing, I have to expect that my code will change due to that. Currently I am giving variables meaningful names and inserting comments. There is also duplicate code which is bothering me, although not hindering anything other than me having to make changes twice. Also, some of my functions are too long and have to be broken up. My C is better than my PERL, so I am more used to doing things in the good "Code Complete" style when programming in C, but my PERL programs are getting long enough, and are changing enough where I have to make sure it is not spaghetti code.

After working as a UNIX admin for ten years, I decided (with a friend's encouragement) two years ago to go to night school to get my bachelors. I took a lot of required courses for art and the like first, but my last two courses and current course are on the Computer Science major track. Aside from getting a cursory knowledge of C++ in my last class, I haven't learned much useful that I can apply yet, although my current class on assembly is supposed to go over processor registers, memory etc. So far we have only been learning addition in binary and the like.

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