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A *real* programming challenge.

A long time ago, I wrote a piece about how I did­n't like kcal­c. It con­tained a very lame pyqt script show­ing a (IMHO) nicer cal­cu­la­tor. Strange­ly, that lead to two very cool im­ple­men­ta­tions of the con­cep­t!

One of them was writ­ten in Ruby, the oth­er one in C++. I think that has some po­ten­tial.

A few months lat­er, I wrote a spread­sheet based on the same con­cep­t. Al­so based on PyQt.

This Stupid­Sheet has some con­cep­tu­al prob­lem­s. Like, if you want to im­port Ex­cel sheet­s, you would have to re­write ba­sic in python, so it's not a prac­ti­cal pro­gram, but it is a rather nice ex­am­ple show­ing pro­gram­ming us­ing dy­nam­ic lan­guages.

In fac­t, I used it as such last week at Cafe­Con­f.

Now, here's the chal­lenge. If peo­ple that know how to write Ru­by or Ja­va apps us­ing Qt (or KDE, why not) could write a sim­i­lar ap­pli­ca­tion, we all could write a com­par­a­tive guide to Qt/KDE pro­gram­ming on dif­fer­ent lan­guages.

Since we would all be start­ing with a not-­too-­com­plex, but re­al­ly non-triv­ial ex­am­ple, and we would all do the same one, it should be pret­ty un­bi­ased.

In fac­t, if you think this ex­am­ple is bi­ased, please pro­pose an­oth­er one, and do this thing any­way.

You can find Stupid­Sheet here

It has some small bugs (try set­ting B1 to A1+1 with no val­ue in A1 ;-) but they are easy to fix.

We could re­move some fea­tures (like the weird past­ing stuff) to make the ex­am­ple more di­dac­tic.

I hope this gets some an­swers :-)


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