Prime second attempt

[pier4r]

(03-15-2019 04:39 AM)mgmander Wrote:  At the time, there didn't seem to be any interest at all.

It has been a very long time since I last worked on it (in 2006 I believe) and while it was pretty much finished, I wasn't super happy with the efficiency of the code and had actually been intending to start from scratch, rewriting the whole thing to streamline it as much as possible.

Thanks for sharing!
I wanted to pick what you said about sharing your code. Your sentiments are pretty common (too common I believe). Gauss himself didn't share his works before the were foolproof, thus keeping plenty of useful works locked in his apartment for too long.

And I believe that's a pity, as it burns a lot of other opportunities.

Imagine one has some solution of sorts, it works (or almost) but it is not as polished as one wants. Therefore the person doesn't share it.
Thus with certainty (100% probability) no one can be inspired by his work, or can see his work as example, no one can fork his work or bring it forward and so on.

Instead if someone shares a solution, in the worst case no one cares, as if the solution was never shared. In better cases at least someone else finds the solution inspiring, as example of code, or to motivate one to "do better", or to use the solution itself.

Another pitfall is that people expect an immediate interest. I googled (on comp.sys.hp48) programs that were written before 2010 and I used them in 2018 (INFORML ). Therefore sharing something allows also future reader to read about it. You never know when someone will be interested. If a solution is not shared, it will never be of any interest.

Of course a caveat is, when sharing a solution, to describe it properly so it can be searched later.

My wish is that more and more people would become less strict in their standards to share their ideas. Furthermore I see that people with low skills share everything they got, people that are skilled try to produce polished results and many of those results never get to public domain as they don't get "polished enough". Hopefully one day this attitude will change, as history shows that the more solutions are shared, filtering trivial contributions, the more useful solutions are discovered.