Rube Goldberg Code

[altenbach]

---

@Ray.R wrote:

Reminds me of "The Bing Bang Theory"  or TBBT for short..

---

I did not know you're such a big fan of microsoft search. 😄 

[Yamaeda]

Bing leads to http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Bing-Bang-Theory/201716170810 when searching on Bing Bang theory.

/Y

[gdwebb01]

Is this bad? 😉

I write my code flat until I know it works, then sub-vi it up. So this is fairly normal for me!  

[altenbach]

---

@gdwebb01 wrote:

Is this bad? 😉

---

What "this" are you referring to? The Rube Goldberg thread has over 800 posts so we can only guess what you are discussing... ;).

[gdwebb01]

interesting .. I clicked reply on page 13 ish, showing masses of code. Forgot the forum is sequential and not tree-like.  

[SteveChandler]

Are you referring to the one by tst on page 13? You really code that way?

People who code that way are in many ways much better programmers than I am. I mean there is no way that I could wrap my head around something so complex without some form of modularization. By the time I scroll six monitor widths to the right and eight monitor heights down, navigated through fourteen nested structures, up seven monitor heights and left nine widths, the noise and code overload has made me completely forget what I was looking at before the journey began and what I was looking for. All I want to do after that is go home and see my dog.

Understanding code such as this almost requires some kind of photographic memory. It's like asking the guy in the other cube with stacks of paper piled randomly on the floor, desk, top of the file cabinet and behind it for a particular document and he finds it in less time than it would take me if things were organized, categorized and alphabetized. He really deserves some kind of weird credit!

If someone with the brain power required to look at the code tst posted and understand what is going on would take the time to learn how to program in a modularized and structured way they would make for one scary good programmer.

[altenbach]

---

@gdwebb01 wrote:

interesting .. I clicked reply on page 13 ish, showing masses of code. Forgot the forum is sequential and not tree-like.  

---

The number of posts/page is user configurable. Easiest is to refer to the post number located near the lower left. Clicking on the number even gives you a direct link to a particular post that then can be embbedded for clarity. 🙂

[gdwebb01]

Thanks altenbach.

Steve that is very kind, but I think it is quite the opposite - if I place code inside sub-vi's I often forget what's inside them and replicate the code somewhere else. I also end up changing data formats back and forth unnecessarily.

I find it much easier to remember what I've done if it's all layed out in front of me. If LabVIEW could zoom, I'd be in my element! My work is R&D so most of my code is written to a creeping specification, or no specification, subsequently I never know what to put in a subvi until it's all finished. I attended the NI Intermediate course and was very impressed how people could plan ahead and write modular code. I wish I could do that, but for the moment I have lots of monitors!

G

[jwdz]

This for you!

[Anthony_de_Vries]

@gdwebb01

Your way of writing code, not working with sub-vi's, reminds me of when I learned programming...  (In Pascal, not Labview.)  We were asked first to write the function headers, and only later implement the code.  But we found that extremely difficult, and always first wrote the code, and then the function header.    But really, that's a very very bad way of programming, that will take revenge when you code larger things.   You just need to take a step back, and get away from the code implementation, and look at the problem at a higher level.  

When you forget what's in your sub-vi's, then you probably haven't programmed them correctly.  It should be self-explanatory what it does.   It should be a logical contained unit, where you don't care how the inside works.   And because you have a handy sub-vi, you will happily re-use the sub-vi countless times, instead of replicating the code.

Difficult to say where the problem lies, without seeing code...   But I'd guess that you don't make your sub-vi's small enough.  And that you don't use enough sub-vi levels.    Sub-vi's typically call other sub-vi's.   It's an hiearchy.