How Do We Uphold Proper Coding Standards? [ANSWERED]

[PheebyKatz]

I feel this is an important question to ask, as there seems to be a great deal of confusion regarding the subject.

What is the risk threshold for potential future misuse of functions taught here, and how do we determine which new scripters are and/or are not intelligent enough be trusted with what information?

I see beginners being given sizable scripts, often being told, "I haven't tested this, but it looks right". Is this safe? I test everything before I ever pass it to another; shouldn't everyone be expected to do this?

Some users prefer some functions over others, even if using them is more complicated than simpler functions, the details of which on the wiki pages can be digested and understood easily in a matter of minutes. How do we determine which person's preferences should or should not be given any credence?

I find the number of "likes" a person has is not much of an indication as to the real validity of their opinions on these subjects, as everyone likes every post made by people who do the same for them, until people have thousands of liked posts, and it still doesn't make what's being posted any better when it doesn't work when it's tested inworld.

So, aside from everyone simply avoiding places like this and sticking to official documentation and the experience of one's own trial and error, how does one decide what sort of help is legitimate, and which isn't?

 

EDIT: It's strange to me that everyone who usually has such ready answers and such readiness to haggle over them can't be bothered to try and answer this one, even though they've been viewing it for over twenty minutes. Does anyone have an answer for this, or is it one of those things that just has to be left to the individual scripter, and not dictated by others?

EDIT2: Okay, thank you all for your honesty. Mark this one as answered, I guess.

Edited June 24, 2018 by PheebyKatz

[ellestones]

On 6/25/2018 at 7:13 AM, PheebyKatz said:

So, aside from everyone simply avoiding places like this and sticking to official documentation and the experience of one's own trial and error, how does one decide what sort of help is legitimate, and which isn't?

EDIT: It's strange to me that everyone who usually has such ready answers and such readiness to haggle over them can't be bothered to try and answer this one, even though they've been viewing it for over twenty minutes.

on your first

whats legitimate is to take the experiences that others relate to us on topics we have little or no knowledge of ourselves, then think about what the contributor has related. When we still have little understanding of what has been related, it can however give us an insight that we never knew to think about sometimes. And what people do relate can often help to guide us to further research

sometimes a posted code may not be 'optimized'. The reason for this is that our understanding of an algorithm is far more important than a coding

example:

integer raM;
integer raL;
integer raH;

// brute factor magnitude
raF()
{
    raL = (integer)llSqrt(raM);
    integer n = 1 + (raM & 0x1);
    raL -= ((!(raL & 0x1)) && (n == 2));
    for (; (raL > 2) && (raM % raL); raL -= n); 
    raH = raM / raL;
}

if I was to post this code in answer to a question: "How can we find the two factors closest to the square root by brute force?" then this is the most optimised answer. However this is not the most optimised answer for all values of raM when raM is some very large N. Factoring large prime numbers for example

industry-experienced programmers can read and understand this code and do write this kinda code themselves depending  on the coding environment and the bounds of this, both implicit and explicit

however giving the above as a solution to a person with little to no knowledge of the subject is a disservice to them without some kinda textual explanation about the algorithm, or when a less optimized more verbose coding can explain it more readily

 

on your second

people sometimes have other things to do, so we will get discussion on most things on the readers' time schedule and not our own

[PheebyKatz]

Five days and this was the best I got. Like I said, Answered already.