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Advice to port it to another language when they don’t understand what it is doing in the original language seems like a recipe for failure to me. I’m no profes

Advice to port it to another language when they don’t understand what it is doing in the original language seems like a recipe for failure to me. I’m no professional coder but I like to play around with stuff and have learned enough C/C++ over the years to code my way out of a paper bag specifically from not trying to reimplement whatever I’m playing with in another language — well, unless that language is Ruby[0] then I fully agree. [0] there was this project that took xml schema and output something (dunno cause ruby) that I ported over to python so I could actually make sense of it because the technique they used was kind of brilliant.

mamcx 5y ago
> Advice to port it to another language when they don’t understand what it is doing in the original language seems like a recipe for failure to me. That depends. I make in my career A LOT of ports from OLD -> NEW. In the very short term, is not good. But in the mid/long term is certainly right if the new lang provide significant advantages (and in the case of C: Almost any other lang provide significant advantages!). The case of C make some no-brainer stuff go out of the window. Making your own hash-table? String? Memory management? All that is a mini-major project and besides the core task. If you don't know C very well, you will screw up your strings, your hash, your memory: How that helps when ALSO you screw up your core tasks?.