From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2008-07-28T15:09:23+09:00
Subject: Re: deaf grandma.

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 2:32 PM, houston barnett-gearhart
<americanpragmatic@gmail.com> wrote:
> thank you, martin, for your reply. i took your advice & wrote an
> algorithm & it's been helping me along quite well. but, i've a few
> questions that arose while i was writing the program. before i get
> started, here's the program thus far: http://pastie.org/242167. i
> realize that the code is a mess & i probably did much more than was
> necessary, but like i said, i'm fairly new to ruby, let alone
> programming. by all means, please suggest how i could clean it up a bit.

I looked at your code, and it looks like you're taking an inside-out
approach to the problem; that is, you're concentrating on the little
bits and then trying to fit them into some sort of overall structure.
Particularly since you're learning to code, I'd strongly recommend
leaving that code alone, and starting from scratch using a more
top-down approach. Specifically, get the *structure* of your program
correct first, then slowly fill in that structure to have all the
features you need. Go back and check out the iterative approach I
suggested in my last post, where you build up the code feature by
feature starting with the basic question-answer-question-answer....
loop.

After you've been at it a while, this will become second nature to
you, and you'll be able to keep the structure of the program in your
head and fill in details even before you have the whole skeleton
mapped out, but that takes experience, and unnecessarily complicates
matters at this stage. Also, when you come to chapter 8 in the
tutorial you'll learn about methods, which are a powerful way to keep
your program well-structured throughout its development.

martin