[Elecraft] Saving K2 VFO modes

[Bill Coleman]

On May 4, 2009, at 5:19 AM, David Woolley (E.L) wrote:

> hen I started in the software industry, one of
> the first things one was told was that one should document code as
> though one expected to be run over by a bus, the next day.

As a fellow software professional, I agree with you in theory.  
However, things in the real world don't always work according to  
theory. With a small shop, especially in a start-up, doing things in  
this fashion might make the difference between shipping the product  
and making money, or delaying shipment and going broke.

You can probably count the number of programmers who have written K2  
firmware on the fingers of one hand. With such a small community, it  
may be simpler to communicate using "tribal knowledge" than extensive  
documentation.

The biggest problem I find professionally with code documentation is  
that external documentation often goes completely out of date by the  
time it is written and is rarely updated. Internal code documentation  
fares little better -- but it is at least close to the actual code.

The best advice I've found is to follow the 40+ year-old findings of  
Gerald M. Wienberg in "The Psychology of Computer Programming" -- the  
only hope for creating readable code is to have programmers regularly  
read each other's code through a process of code review.

Bill Coleman, AA4LR, PP-ASEL        Mail: aa4lr at arrl.net
Web: http://boringhamradiopart.blogspot.com
Quote: "Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!"
             -- Wilbur Wright, 1901