Sunday, May 08, 2005
The Big Ball of Mud
After writing that I didn't want CheckerBoard to become bloatware like so many other programs, I wondered whether there was a formal definition of bloatware. Wikipedia is a fantastic online encyclopedia, free for all to use (and to improve!) - and indeed there was a chapter on bloatware in Wikipedia. Reading through the article and following some links I can now improve on my old code posting: Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of bad programming practices, and I found a lot of things I was guilty of! The top problem of CheckerBoard is that it is a big ball of mud. Related problems are lava flow, procedural code, action at a distance and accumulate and fire. Read the articles and have a good laugh imagining me wading in my big ball of mud :-)
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2 comments:
The wikipedia rocks.
And the wikipedia pages you linked are fun :)
I can imagine a big ball of mud. Isn't most of it related to the interface?
Hi Nelson,
you are right, most of it is related to the interface. If Cake was a big ball of mud, it probably wouldn't play as well as it does :-)
I never liked programming CB, it is more a tool for using Cake, which I need to have. In that sense, I have always neglected it a bit, which is one of the reasons why it is a big ball of mud. I'm trying to clean it up now, but it's really hard once a program is in such a state! I'm removing global variables, trying to remove "extern" keywords and breaking things down in smaller functions. The road is long...
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