Kearney High School vs Lincoln East [December 1979]

My father gave me a nice scrapbook of photos at Christmas. Here I'm shooting in the lane against Lincoln East. I'm pretty sure I missed the shot.

[added later: a kearney high game played tonight]

Clue in the Friday NYT

52 Across: Pioneer in the math of Sudoku (5)

answer

Hmmm—not sure I buy that.

I did like

Nitpick? (7)

answer

Toss or document (or both)?

Instead of simply discarding big chunks of software I hack together after they get too complicated for me to understand (or use) anymore—as is my usual practice—I've decided to try write manual pages for them, instead. Then it at least I have some record of it before it gets trashed.

I'm writing up one set of soon-to-be-discarded software this morning. Already it's looking like it might be a useful idea.

I got the idea that it's best to simply toss big and confusing blobs of code long ago after reading this passage from Don Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, vol I, pg 188, "Basic Concepts: Subroutines:"

Step 3 (Reexamination). The result of Step 2 should be very nearly a working program, but it may be possible to improve on it. A good way is to reverse direction again, studying for each subroutine all of the calls made on it. It may well be that the subroutine should be enlarged to do some of the more common things which are always done by the outside routine just before or after it uses the subroutine. Perhaps several subroutines should be merged into one; or perhaps a subroutine is called only once (if we are fortunate, perhaps one is never called) and should not be subroutine at all.

Then the kicker:

At this point, it is often a good idea to scrap everything and start over again at step 1! This is not intended to be a facetious remark; the time spent in getting this far has not been wasted, for we have learned a great deal about our problem. We will probably know of several improvements that can be made to the organization of the program; there is no reason to be afraid to go back to step 1—it will be much easier to go through the above steps again after a program has been done already. Moreover, we will quite probably save as much debugging time later on as it will take to rewrite the program. Some of the best programs ever written owe much of their success to the fact that about this stage all the work was unintentionally lost and the authors had to begin again.