On the funny note

Posted Aug 2, 2013 19:51 UTC (Fri) by dakas (guest, #88146)
In reply to: On the funny note by bojan
Parent article: Computer scientists develop 'mathematical jigsaw puzzles' to encrypt software (UCLA)

I had this for years. Works like this. Write a piece of code. Revisit it several years later. No idea what it does... :-)

Once disassembled some Reversi program written in Z80 assembly. That guy could code. Registers used logically and consistently, scoring tables straightforward, alpha/beta pruning straight out of the textbook... Everything made perfect sense.

Once recoded an old arcade game of mine written in Z80 assembly into C. Wanted to go C++, object oriented for the monsters and so on. The comments were pretty much exclusively restricted to clock cycle tallies (no timer chip, and those are bad for deterministic game play anyway).

Everything still made sense. So much so that there was just nothing to be gained by trying to recode the logic into some kind of OO programming.

I agree that most programs nowadays are an exercise in obfuscation right from the get-go. Real programs are like a song. It doesn't matter whether it's a music style you heard before or not: you notice whether it's good, whether its tools and principles make for a cohesive whole, whether things fall into place everywhere.