User talk:Kira Komarov

A word from the shamed

I've been wandering through the Wizardry and Steamworks code. I think what you are doing is a good thing but I want to pass along a cautionary tale I swear to you is true, as it happened to me last week. For years I have scripted in LSL and until recently I was confident in my ability and skill at coding, to the point that I felt I wrote code without syntax errors and that if I spent enough time reviewing the logic I wouldn't ever need to run the code. So in 2008 I expanded the article Right Shift posting the optimal code for doing an unsigned right shift. Last week someone edited the article saying my code didn't work, I couldn't believe it, I had even included a test script in the article which predicted the correct answer in it's comments. I knew my logic to beyond reproach. I thought it was a bug, some breaking change, I posted a JIRA. A Linden responded asking for more details. Then I ran the test script. I had apparently never ran the test script before. I soon found the problem. It never worked.

What unnerved me so about this was that my logic was flawed. I code in logical building blocks and then I manipulate and optimize them. I love coding, I love the logic, it's one thing to overlook an edge case, it's another thing altogether to be wrong. I am now left questioning all the code I have written in the last 4 if not 5 years. A take it you are someone like me who takes pride their work. Do yourself the favor of testing every bit of code you post, save yourself from having 4 years of shame coming home to roost all at once. When it came to Right Shift there were only two options, I could either fix the article or revert it to before I had contributed. There was really only one option I had, I had to fix it, if I didn't I would be then denying there were other better ways to solve the problem but fixing it would be admitting I was wrong. If I had only been in the habit of running my code, I would have spotted the flaw, I would have avoided all of this. At any time during the first six months I could have run the code and it wouldn't have hurt so. The code I posted was supposed to help people.

Not all the examples on Wizardry_and_Steamworks/Full_Spectrum_Re-Channeling compile (ignoring that you define functions later in the article). Take my advice on this and you will never be shamed like I was, your pride will be unblemished. -- Strife ^{(talk|contribs)} 16:44, 27 November 2011 (PST)

P.S. I'm enjoying reading Wizardry_and_Steamworks/Full_Spectrum_Re-Channeling, the issue of having to parse events not intended for the script and discarding them resulting in event-queue backup and eventual dropping of events is a serious problem. I have seen it happen with link_messages, the solution to which is to put your scripts in different prims and then send the message to the specific prim instead of LINK_SET etc. If the simulator is busy it just makes the problem all that much worse.