Pascal community on IRC has been all but destroyed

[Martin_fr]

I can see no advantage on using chat for that and a lot to be gained from the forum

The main disadvantage that I see specifically for discussions about unready applications is that the forum posts will be found on the internet. So when it is later published and people search for the name there is a big chance to stumble over such posts.

Not what I mean.

Now some preface, on the forum my motivation to answer is that it may help many and over help now and in future. On the IRC, since I do not ask I do get nothing back (in my perception), but if I had reason to answer, such as I owe someone....

If someone were trying to learn some new tool, and the answer was not just "do foo", but a long sequence of do this, check that. => Then it would be helpful if I could (like a personal tutor) be around, let them do the first step, and then hear how it works, and give my next part of the answer adapted to what they got (including if they noticed all that I thought they would....)

Basically personally tutor.

Only, I have no motivation to do so for free, for a stranger.
And not only for free, but also to sit hours on call running IRC until such a stranger shows up.
Those last two line are where I still don't grasp some of the concept.
Obviously some people do. They must have motivation for it.

[440bx]

I basically agree with everything @Martin_fr mentioned above.

In addition to that, I really believe it is much more likely for someone to get a reasonably well thought out reply to a question in a forum than in a chat medium where answers are doled out faster than hamburgers at McDonalds floating in secret sauce (secret sauce = b.s from someone who has no idea what they're talking about but wanted to answer the question anyway.)

I find it surprising there are IRC channels for programming languages.  A C++ irc channel must be really fun to read... is an exclamation sign an indication the programmer is excited or a variable being negated ? 

[mischi]

My 2cents:

After being fairly active on IRC, I am somewhat tired of all the posts about conspiracy theories, windows bashing and the like. Therefore, I am seriously considering to leave IRC completely, unless it turns out to be better on libera.

Michael.

[kupferstecher]

Only, I have no motivation to do so for free, for a stranger.
And not only for free, but also to sit hours on call running IRC until such a stranger shows up.
Those last two line are where I still don't grasp some of the concept.
Obviously some people do. They must have motivation for it.

Probably the social aspect is more important than the technical when using IRC. I never used it, so I just can guess.

[engkin]

...the social aspect is more important than the technical when using IRC....

I totally agree with this.

[Joanna]

Enkin I don’t own a cell phone at all and I don’t intend to get one just for the purpose of using an application that wants to do datamining.

Irc is like talking to live people. Forums are more like email. Both are important but I think it’s definitely possible to get to know people better and faster on irc in both a good and bad way.

Going off topic has definitely been detrimental to the irc channel and split people up along political lines and scared away Some members. Going off topic can also be a result of not enough people in channel talking about pascal so there is a silence that people who are online and in the mood to talk want to fill.

I was sometimes guilty of participating in off topic chat myself then I made my own social channel and tried to move the offtopic discussions there. There were still people who insisted upon having offtopic discussions in the fpc channel on freenode rather than joining my channel. All of them refuse to come to Libera so no need to worry about them.

The new libera chat channels are a good opportunity to improve our presence in irc to be like it should be. All we need is more good people to join and participate.

kupferstecher  I definitely wouldn’t want to post an unfinished app in a forum that is searchable on the internet nor even share copies of it with unknown parties through the internet. I notice that there are likely a lot more views on the threads than pascal programmers.

 I’ve been emailing it just to people I know who are interested in testing it and then chatting about it in private message in irc.
 Since I send it encrypted I need to tell them the password in irc. I don’t know how other people do this I’m kind of new to this. I prefer not to use a repository owned by third parties.

[Martin_fr]

kupferstecher  I definitely wouldn’t want to post an unfinished app in a forum that is searchable on the internet nor even share copies of it with unknown parties through the internet. I notice that there are likely a lot more views on the threads than pascal programmers.

 I’ve been emailing it just to people I know who are interested in testing it and then chatting about it in private message in irc.
 Since I send it encrypted I need to tell them the password in irc. I don’t know how other people do this I’m kind of new to this. I prefer not to use a repository owned by third parties.

Well, you protect the content by encryption anyway.

So then what is the difference, if this encrypted content is stored on a 3rd party mail server (possibly google, but plenty others, even if some local provider - still 3rd party).
Or if it is stored on a3rd party storage/file hoster/share service (google drive, or whatever)?

A repository could hold the data, but there would be no advantage for encrypted blobs of data. (and you need to check the terms of service....)
You could run a repro (unencrypted) on your own PC, and accept incoming ssh connections (dyn dns and port forwarding) .

Anyway transferring the encrypted blob is usually not the issue.

----------
Transferring the password...
Is that IRC connection encrypted? end to end, between you and the final recipient? Or does the IRC provider get your plain text password?

Or is the security not that important? Just some obscurity is enough?

[Joanna]

Actually it seems gmail won’t even let me email the app because it’s an executable.

I used zip7 to both compress and password protect the file.
I use the sasl option for irc I don’t know how secret any of this stuff really is.

I suppose the email and the message in irc would both have to be intercepted by the same parties to get the ability to run my app.
If I wanted to I could put something into the app to make it only work for a limited time. I don’t know how easy it is to reverse engineer an app written in fpc. Or how I can write the app to be more difficult to reverse engineer.

[440bx]

I don’t know how easy it is to reverse engineer an app written in fpc. Or how I can write the app to be more difficult to reverse engineer.

No harder than an app written in C/C++ but, in some ways easier.  As far as making it more difficult to reverse engineer, all the tricks you can learn on how to do that, reverse engineers know them all and then some. 

Quite likely, one of the hardest things to reverse engineer is/was MS' implementation of DRM, yet one of their versions was reversed engineered.

[Joanna]

440bx it’s a lot like the story of a safe in the possession of a thief .

I think for those in the know there are ways to make things harder to reverse engineer but I don’t know what those are. I believe that the reverse engineering involves stepping through the code and looking at the assembly language and addresses ?

[440bx]

I think for those in the know there are ways to make things harder to reverse engineer but I don’t know what those are. I believe that the reverse engineering involves stepping through the code and looking at the assembly language and addresses ?

Yes, there are definitely ways to make a program harder to reverse engineer but, there is no technical way to make a program impossible to reverse engineer.  Looking at assembly language and stepping through code is square one (1), there is a lot more to it than that.

My sincere suggestion is, don't go beyond some very basic methods (which are easily defeated) because, the more sophisticated the methods you use, the more likely you'll introduce bugs in the program and the harder the program gets to maintain for its author(s).  IOW, all the tricks you use will get in your way before they get in somebody else's way.

[Joanna]

440bx I guess I find the whole inner workings of programs idea fascinating. My programming style involves deep inheritance with as little redundant code as possible. I often wonder how that affects program behavior as opposed to programs written by people who don’t use inheritance and don’t have the same class being used by so many parts of program.

[Martin_fr]

I guess we are getting off topic, but I also guess (ignoring the time-to-response) we are getting into an IRC like chat....

My programming style involves deep inheritance with as little redundant code as possible. I often wonder how that affects program behavior as opposed to programs written by people who don’t use inheritance and don’t have the same class being used by so many parts of program.

There is ton of stuff in that sentence of yours.

But first, if that is the kind of stuff that interests you, you want to look into design patterns.
There is tons of it on the net. Try to find sources, that do not just describe how the pattern looks like. Most important is the description of the motivation. Why would you use the pattern. What would you improve. How does it affect future maintenance and extension of the code.

Google got me that page, they do have a nice list of patterns, but I do not know how well they are explained. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/design_pattern/index.htm

If you really get into it, one of the ultimate works on the topic (advanced level) is by the Gang of Four https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns

From your statement I would say there are some aspect of OO that you have entirely down, and could do in your sleep. Time to expand.

Have a look at "delegation over inheritance" or "composition over inheritance".

You seem to write your classes for technical reasons: reduction of code duplication.
Each class can be seen as having a responsibility. Did you plan those? Can you specify a clear list for each class? Overlaps between responsibility?  Or mixing of unrelated responsibility?

As you can see, there is tons of stuff out there. A bit of copy and pasted code, can bite you later that is true. But grouping the wrong code (or data or both) together, or splitting up code that shouldn't be split => that will bite you, stab you and laugh at you when you look at it in a few years.

[440bx]

I often wonder how that affects program behavior as opposed to programs written by people who don’t use inheritance and don’t have the same class being used by so many parts of program.

There are two large programs, with published source code, that do not use inheritance, nor OOP, you can look at.  One is ReactOS, which is a Windows XP O/S clone.  The other one is Process Hacker which is a, sort of, clone of Sysinternals' Process Explorer.  A few others come to mind but, those two should keep you busy for a "little while".

Very educational stuff.

[Joanna]

The problem which inspired the thread has yet to be solved. Libera channels mostly inactive and the  two people who are most helpful remain on the freenode network where the IRCCloud client which is most convenient for me to use is banned...

The planning of what is now my code happened in a long drawn out process of discovery. I’ve redone it so many times I’ve lost count.
It started with the realization that a frame with label and Tcombobox has a lot in common with a frame with a label and tedit  I eventually made a frame which contains a flow panel for all frames which contain controls which rearrange to inherit.

My base frame is what all frames have in common for the sake of polymorphism. I have two types of what you would call factories . One makes a set number of a type of control And puts them in a flow panel. The other is located in the base frame and accepts an array containing class types to create. This one anchors them vertically in the order in which they were created.

Future maintenance and reuse is definitely part of my plan.
My program consists of primarily nested frames built with reusable frames that do Specific tasks. For instance I have a frame which inherited my frame with only a button on it that will reset the appearance of the entire application when the button is clicked.
Whenever I have a problem I can test each frame separately to find the problem starting with the simple frames.
I try keep the amount of code in each file small and do as much as possible at the lowest level frames. Using virtual methods in descendants to change behavior when necessary.

I have had a little bit of the problem of inheritance when it comes to frames inheriting things they don’t always need in the case of when I made  many frames inherit the ability to use an sql table by having variables to store table and column information . Most of my focus has been on using sqlite so in most cases it’s ok but the idea still bothers me a bit that there are unnecessary things not being used. Before that I was using interface to make different types of frames able to use sql but I didn’t like it and decided to go with polymorphism instead. Maybe I’ll redo it with better design someday after I learn to program ...

I’m definitely familiar with the concept of reading My old code and Saying that the person who wrote this doesn’t know what they are doing...

My current task is making a combobox descendant of my labeled combobox that will pick a color from the standard list of colors that start with “cl “ like clred. When I pick a color it changes the color of the combobox which is a lot of fun. It will be used for letting users decide what colors they want the grid cells to highlight for certain values.