Brown trousers time :~

[asmith9983@gmail.com]

Hi
Instead of thinking of it as your biggest  project, break it up into a set of 
more manageable smaller projects, which you can can really focus on. Are you 
programming this by yourself, or are you part of a team  ?  Write some good 
design documentation before you start. Looking back later it'll tell you what 
you intended, whereas the code  only says what it's doing.   If the project 
has 10's of thousands of lines then someone is investing a lot in its 
construction, so long-term maintenance must be a consideration.  Incorporate 
a test routines  into your design so any changes can be easily tested. This 
takes time.

-- 
Andrew

On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Ovid wrote:

> --- "Lyle - CosmicPerl.com" <perl at cosmicperl.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>  Soon I'll be embarking on the largest project I've ever undertaken.
>> It's going to be 10's of thousands of lines of code. It needs to be
>> perfect (or damn close :))
>
> Skipping most of the rest, what's of paramount importance is that your
> code is both correct (does things right) and complete (does everything
> it *must*).  That's the best place to start from when worrying about
> optimization and there are plenty of well-established tools to help you
> analyze your code's performance (from painful personal experience, most
> programmers who try to guess up front what they need to optimize get it
> wrong).
>
> So how do you ensure your code is both correct and complete?  It's
> tough, but testing is one of the best ways to get close.  I'd recommend
> the O'Reilly book "Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook"
> (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perltestingadn/).  (disclaimer: I was
> one of the reviewers, so I may be biased).  Once you learn to start
> automated testing, so many other "hard" problems in programming become
> so much easier.
>
> Once you have a correct and complete system built, with tests, then you
> can profile and optimize to your heart's content and feel much more
> confident that you haven't broken anything.
>
> Cheers,
> Ovid
>
> --
> Buy the book  - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlhks/
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>