Re: Nethack! (was): AdaGames

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

Juanma Barranquero <lektu@terra.es> wrote in message news:<d59lauoth400po2r2ketc02mcms91bbk61@4ax.com>...
> On 2 Apr 2002 10:30:14 -0800, dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)
> wrote:
> 
> >Interesting. I usually use "grep -c ";"" for SLOC counting. "wc -l"
> >just counts newlines, which adds loads of whitespace and comment lines
> >to the count.
> 
> <sigh> I somewhat suspected this was going to end in a discussion
> about the line-counting method used... Using yours, no doubt more

I know. I wouldn't have brought it up, except that:
o  An intellectually dishonest person (*not* you of course) could
hardly have found a better way to create themselves huge SLOC counts.
Since you were honest enough to report your method, I figured you'd
care about such perceptions.
o  If that is how you are counting, I have no clue what your numbers
mean, because they bear no relation to numbers I am used to looking
at.

> Well, your original argument was that porting NetHack to Ada was easy,
> and even if the sources are 85K SLOCs it is still a very large project
> for just one programmer to undertake as a hobby. I think you're
> severily underestimating NetHack's size and complexity.

Looking over this thread, I suspect we are talking about two different
things. I won't argue that hand-porting all the existing C code for
the current version of nethack would be a lot of work. However, making
a simple hack-like game that runs would be fairly easy. The way
OpenSource (Bazaar) projects work (I'm using the ESR terminology,
because he's the one who came up with the Cathedral & Bazaar theory),
you don't try to do the whole thing in one go (Cathedral-style). You
make something small that is interesting and runs, release it, then
incrementally improve it. The better it gets, the more people who use
it. The more people who use it, the more who will want to help improve
it. The more it gets improved, the more people use it. etc. So
ideally, things snowball on their own from a relatively small initial
individual investment.

Sure, this process won't net you *the* Nethack. But trying to
hand-port it won't either. By the time you could get done with it, the
C codebase would have moved on.


-- 
T.E.D.
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