What if the author's view of difficulty is skewed? I've been told a snippet or two that I've written were pains the ass but I'd rate their difficulty (both that of installation and of the original creation) at a -5/10.
Difficulty rating would be completely coder bias, some coders think making a function that says hi to the entire mud is difficult, where-as someone else would think thats child-play.
Difficulty is a state of mind, i'm a more advanced coder, so when i do something, and it is difficult, i tend to note it within my snippet (if i release the code) that it was indeed, difficult.
My opinion on this is difficulty rating is completely based on the coders talents, if the coder sucks, doing something big would be difficult, but if the coder is really good, then they would gage it based on their ability. Its off skew.
mmm well you could get a group of coders ( some good some bad etc ) to rate the code itself for difaculty then average the scores that would cut back on the bias a bit
mmm well you could get a group of coders ( some good some bad etc ) to rate the code itself for difaculty then average the scores that would cut back on the bias a bit
Some good, some bad? I don't know that there are bad coders out there… Just less experienced ones maybe? :wink:
Erh, the way I see it, a _massive_ portion of people who would actually use a snippet are inexperienced (most I know would rather write it themselves unless it's a really, really big pain in the ass and they stumble on a snippet that's well written) and probably not going to comment, either.
I have to agree with Midboss on that one. I use to use snippets all the time and I'm trying to avoid snippets. They are great if they are well written and would save you alot of time then feel free. But I always kind of looked at snippets as a chance to learn how to do something (and in some cases as how not to do something). Even back when I used snippets I don't know how many I would no more then glance at and simply delete because it was written badly. I also agree that difficutly does depend greatly on whos doing the codeing. Things I can toss in very quickly others could probably spend weeks getting in. A rating type of deal that others can rate it would be nice I guess so it gets an overall oppinion of it.
I don't think difficulty ratings are in the cards. We already have general ratings on the code itself which are subjective enough as it is. How difficult something is would be even harder to quantify. If people feel a piece of code here is difficult to install, they can make a comment to that affect in the listing for it.
Overall, I'm going to take the position on this one that Samson has expressed, we've already got a general overal rating for each submission and room for all the comments one cares to leave regarding that snippet.
As for good or bad coders, there are some folks who just don't quite have it in them to grasp coding, but in general I would think that most folk who can look at some code and understand what they're seeing can eventually become good coders given some experience and guidance.
Remcon, I've seen you completely rewrite a function that ended up a thousand lines of code, basically from scratch, in under an hour.. enough said on that one. :wink:
Finally, I agree with Remcon's last comment that the reason folks who won't use a snippet themselves would frequent a snippet site is two fold, at least from what I can see, one, they want to give back to the community by releasing their snippets for those who lack their experience, and two, they play watchdog over the snippets others release to correct things in them so newbie coders won't get too frustrated and quit because someone's snippet wasn't written to be usable. Both of which are great reason for those of you who can code that well. Personally, I still need snippets and am very proud of the fact that I've come far along enough to have been able to release a few back into the community myself, even though I know that what I've released were generally easy things that someone with more experience could've probably done far more easily and possibly in a better way.