Programming, what makes you lose time?

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The subject above seems to me a good one to test the 'thought' blog possibility

From experience with C under OS4.1.4, i noted the lack of a good working debugger as one of the main problems. The only thing i can use it for, is to set it for one breakpoint and have the backtrace information, giving me some info. If this breakpoint is reached first in a non-buggy piece of the SW, this info is not worth much though.
I tried to use Debug 101 but the interface confused me. I don't really know how good it is.

An other point is my keyboard, with worn-out keys. Keyboards are cheap but should you throw them away just for that sake? Replacement stickers for the keys seem to cost more than a new low-cost keyboard.

Maybe the most time consuming part is searching through the OS system documentation (including Amiga Development CD 2.1). Time and time again i do only find a small part of what i really need, start trying, do come to the conclusion that i miss some other info...
There is no substitute for understanding, but a better organised documentation structure would help.

If i ask how you tackle these problems, where you do lose time this would maybe some usefull threads. Then the question arises if the forum should not include those sections

- development tools
- documentation

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kas1e's picture

Currently i (with help of some skilled coders) works on the book, which purposes will be: disassembling, assembly, debugging, low-level kernel stuff and all of this kind for os4. That will be not for newbe programmers of course, but for someone who already can code, but want to know interenals and so on. So i think it will somehow fill the gap and cover all what you mean (Hope soon to publish some of the chapters, once enlgish grammars will be fixed in)

JosDuchIt's picture

Looking forward for it.
Will it be available in computer readable form?
What i miss is direct links when in the doc a reference is made to other functions, structures etc
and better overviews:
- Most libraries docs just give an alphabetic list of functions. functions belonging together are not recognised directly as such. (application.doc is the first to make some visible subdivision.)
- Most structures are defined in the includes, but a number are in the autodocs.
- In some areas (eg memory allocation) you find related functions in different libraries (so a newbee easily misses some)

I did, since my original post, extract from the SDK a full list of functions/library.doc and stuctures/reference-doc. I am using them now in the Gui4Cli written set of C-coding tools i am 'breeding'

kas1e's picture

Sample chapter will be released in next days, and form will be PDF + online at this site. Book as well will be PDF + online, and maybe paper version as well (if that will make any sense in end).

jaokim's picture

Replacement stickers for the keys seem to cost more than a new low-cost keyboard.

I found Amiga-keyboard stockers on 4keyboard.com, which weren't that pricey; $3.47.

On the topic I have to say that work makes mw loose time coding on my Amiga.
Another thing is to continue work from one day to the other.