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> I see a dilemma here. Nobody, not even 10x faster than the author, writes a full-fledged text editor in 10 hours. You can create something interesting that do

> I see a dilemma here. Nobody, not even 10x faster than the author, writes a full-fledged text editor in 10 hours. You can create something interesting that does text editing in 10 hours (or 100), but it's mostly going to be a learning exercise. You won't have created a piece of software that is of any value to anyone but yourself. You could if you had enough components to assemble the text editor from.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
I could stick a GtkTextView into a GtkWindow and run it inside GtkApplication, sure. That's not what I mean, and I don't think it's what the author of TFA means, by "write a text editor".
- klyrs 5y ago
  The 1000000x solution: <textarea></textarea> (this is me agreeing with you)
sumtechguy 5y ago
hmm I prob could make something kind of like a text editor in win32 fairly quickly as I can think of about a dozen built in calls that would make it work. Would it be full featured? Not much but it would do the very basics (cut/paste/save/read/edit). But that is because I know the system pretty well. If you dropped me into some other system it would take me a decent amount of time.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  What you're describing is precisely what I mean: "something that would do the very basics". Sure, I could cook one of those up, probably in less than 10 hours. But that's all it would do, and all I'd have done is learnt a few things. If I stopped right there, that's the only outcome: me learning some stuff. Presumably at some point, the learning needs to be applied to something that is actually useful?
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    Almost all projects start that way as some small learning project. You usually do not build complete applications in 1 day. You usually lean heavy on existing libs or chunks of code you already learned somewhere else. That is what that sort of thing is for. In my 26 years doing this most of what I have written has been thrown away. There may still be some bits here and there living on but I doubt it. Yet at one point all of that code had a use and did it well. That use was me using that knowledge to get things done. Those prototype projects do a lot of that sort of thing. If I wanted to make an scala version of my 'basic editor' it would probably take me at least a week of digging through docs and trying things. But in another realm I can bash it out in a couple of hours. My point was your domain knowledge is what makes you a better developer.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

I could stick a GtkTextView into a GtkWindow and run it inside GtkApplication, sure. That's not what I mean, and I don't think it's what the author of TFA means, by "write a text editor".

klyrs 5y ago
The 1000000x solution: <textarea></textarea> (this is me agreeing with you)

sumtechguy 5y ago

hmm I prob could make something kind of like a text editor in win32 fairly quickly as I can think of about a dozen built in calls that would make it work. Would it be full featured? Not much but it would do the very basics (cut/paste/save/read/edit). But that is because I know the system pretty well. If you dropped me into some other system it would take me a decent amount of time.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
What you're describing is precisely what I mean: "something that would do the very basics". Sure, I could cook one of those up, probably in less than 10 hours. But that's all it would do, and all I'd have done is learnt a few things. If I stopped right there, that's the only outcome: me learning some stuff. Presumably at some point, the learning needs to be applied to something that is actually useful?
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  Almost all projects start that way as some small learning project. You usually do not build complete applications in 1 day. You usually lean heavy on existing libs or chunks of code you already learned somewhere else. That is what that sort of thing is for. In my 26 years doing this most of what I have written has been thrown away. There may still be some bits here and there living on but I doubt it. Yet at one point all of that code had a use and did it well. That use was me using that knowledge to get things done. Those prototype projects do a lot of that sort of thing. If I wanted to make an scala version of my 'basic editor' it would probably take me at least a week of digging through docs and trying things. But in another realm I can bash it out in a couple of hours. My point was your domain knowledge is what makes you a better developer.