A Neophyte Tackles the FG Extension - Allow Me to Introduce Myself
by
, May 4th, 2016 at 00:17 (45703 Views)
It seems as though the place to start a new blog is with an introduction by the blogger. My name is Tom. I live in Reno, Nevada (western US). I have written programs in a variety of environments, market sectors, and genres since 1977. I’ve written programs in machine code, and in at least 6 or 7 different languages. They’ve included simple games, modeling magma bodies in the earth’s crust, completing forms and health insurance claims, and slot machine pay verification. What do I hope to accomplish in this blog; what‘s my intent? In the FG forums I have seen, time and time again, ‘FG extensions, where do I start?’ I hope that in the future, they will start here.
This blog is not aimed at the experienced software developer. Although I hope there may be a gem in here, once in a while, that the career developer might find useful. I want to help the “new to programming“, or “never have programmed“ FG user gain some insight into how to extend the capabilities of FG. I hope to do this by dissecting some of the code in FG’s rulesets. This won’t be a coding clinic, there are lots of good tutorials for that. It also won’t be a, please troubleshoot my code for me, help desk. There are some really, really bright people on the FG forums that have been doing that for some time now. I want to give you, the inexperienced code writer, a bit of skill and the confidence to attack the lines of code in the rulesets and figure out for yourself, what they do and how they do it.
However, you should know, I am the neophyte. I have not written a number of extensions, not even one. So why read this blog? As I try to write my first extension, I am going to tackle many issues and I want to relate them here in this blog. What did I come up against? How did I solve the problem? What to look out for. What was my methodology? I’ll convey all of this by relating my methodologies as we stumble through the code.
Besides my coding experience, I bring to the table, what I believe to be an insight in to how to explain computing tasks in simple terms. Let me give you an example. The manager of a physician’s office once asked me why their billing software was so slow. After a little investigation I explained it this way: “When the program needs to update the database, it doesn’t just change the data in the database. It brings the database to you, to be changed at your desktop. It’s as if someone has a hand truck and brings the whole filing cabinet to you, not just a sheet of paper, or the manila file folder, but the whole filing cabinet! When you’re pushing that much data around, it takes a lot of time.”
Until next time keep on role playing.
(If you’re revisiting this post, you’ll notice a rewrite. A couple family members, better writers than I, suggested it be revised.)