Frustrations of a n00b

note: This is taken from my blog. Hopefully it will cheer up a few people that are stressed :smiley:

When you begin writing/coding an IF, there’s one thing that no-one tells you.

It has the ability to drive you completely, utterly and totally mad. Shhh, its a secret…

The frustration of playing around with one bit of code, and trying it over, and over, and over, and yes, over again, tends to make you start seeing things in a different light. It seems no matter what you do, your program (be it Inform or anything else) seems to have it out for you.

No matter how your phrase the code, or even if you start from scratch, or use an already “tested” piece of code, it raises its eyebrow and spits it right back at you.

The last few days have been spent doing completely boring coding, so lets skip to today.

Todays Achievements

Time!
Include real date and time stamping in tables (record/keep for status but omit for non-working users that don’t have glk interfaces)
I7 said: “I already have time, I don’t need yours too, I’ll just show mine”.

So I: Wrote rules, omitted things, changed types/values, and generally tried every single thing I could think of.
I7 said: “Wrong, wrong and very, very wrong. Your terrible at this aren’t you?”

So I: Start from scratch, pull hair out, start randomly punching chair, rewrite new code.
I7 said: “Okay, I’ll accept that for now, I’ll just destroy you down the line later”

I7 said:“Oh! Your compiling! Segfault! See ya later, hahahaha!”
*Yes, I actually got the code working perfectly for now, but I am worried about the rule I wrote for clashing later on…we’ll have to see how it goes. And I save before I compile each time, so I didn’t lose anything, more an annoyance than anything else.

Help Menu!
I’m making a very big/modified help menu that has numerous interesting things in it, I’ve been working on various parts, this bit is just for one of the shortcut areas, today. Creating a shortcut to the “new to IF” section of the menu

Code used:

Transcript:

newb

up pops window q

noob

up pops window q

n00b

That is not a verb I recognise.

*at this point steam is starting to come out of my ears

n00b *this is me thumping each key, as if that will make it understand better.

[size=150]That is not a verb I recognise.[/size]

About that point I sort of went of the deep end a little, spending a all day figuring out what I’m doing wrong, followed by that…well it was a very long day.

I spent a couple of seconds madly bashing the keyboard, and what do you know, I made a masterpiece:

And you know what? Upon compiling, it segfaulted and crashed.

xxx

You probably realized, but you never told Inform to actually understand “n00b” as anything :slight_smile:

:unamused: Yeah, I realized that after I re-opened to “play” for the transcript, and sat there staring at the screen with an “Oh! DUH!” look on my face for about 10 minutes :laughing: My brain tends to go on holiday quite often and I miss out on the “obvious” things

Useful tip: http://www.englishbaby.com/lessons/grammar/your_vs_youre

Campbell your a grammr nazi.
correctyoure.png