Hi Frank,
I really appreciate your suggestion. Lazy as I am I'm happy about every
line of code which I don't have to write myself. Nevertheless some
comments to your proposal (see inline).
Frank Schönheit - Sun Microsystems Germany wrote:
every time I'm writing a piece of code, and need some helper class which
I assume is already implemented somewhere (since my requirement sounds
quite generic), I can't help but get the impression that we have
hundreds of helper implementations, of which 95% are unknown to 95% of
us developers.
Maybe it's only me, but somehow I believe that a lot of us don't even
know the goodies which hide in the various *helper places, and thus
either unnecessarily re-implement them, or simply produce code which
could have been more elegant, and/or more robust, and/or easier to
maintain, and/or easier to read, ... (continue at will).
What I would like to suggest is some kind of "Helper of the Day"
initiative. People who know a certain piece of (helper) code in one of
the above-mentioned projects should introduce this piece to others,
shortly saying what it is (and perhaps what it is _not_) good for.
Ideally, this means just copying the code's documentation into an email,
less ideally, this means writing this documentation first.
I would also suggest that people like you for instance who need a helper
class shortly write down their requirements and ask on a respective
mailing list if such a helper class already exist before implementing it
themself. If it really happens that they have discovered someting new
and they implement a new helper class they should carefully document it
and announce it as "Helper of the day" as you suggested of course.
Those mails could, in irregular order, be posted to some list (probably
[EMAIL PROTECTED], or [EMAIL PROTECTED], or ?).
Wouldn't [EMAIL PROTECTED] a better choice? This is the place where
I would look for the questionable information.
Such an initiative would require at least
- potential readers - would somebody else except me consider this
useful?
- potential writers, which volunteer to spend a little of /their/ time
to save more of us /a lot of/ time.
What do you think?
Again - very good idea.
Kind regards,
Tino
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