I taught myself Pascal in high school. I was not admitted to the AP course my high school was offering due to my overall GPA, so I taught myself to 1. spite the arrogant jerk of a teacher who denied me, and 2. follow along with the course so I could spend time with my friends. I had been taught other languages (LOGO when I was 12, and BASIC when I was 13) so I wasn’t a stranger to programming. What I was a stranger to, however, was discipline.

My early code, which includes my early demo coding, is sloppy. Oh, the code is nice to look at and doesn’t contain spelling errors, but it is incredibly sloppy. Instead of using REP MOVSW to copy memory around, or even Turbo Pascal’s move() procedure, I would copy one array to another byte by byte. Instead of sorting an array by inserting an array set into a sorted binary tree and then copying it back to the array (heapsort), I would loop through the array and swap crap as necessary (bubblesort). Instead of learning how to use pointers, I would try to trick the compiler into giving me multiple data segments (which had the side effect of bloating the executable). Essentially, I lacked experience, insight, and wisdom — and my programs were buggy and slow as a result.

Today, nearly 20 years later, that is not the case. I still program in Turbo Pascal, but I use pointers/heap, objects, inheritance, and especially in-line assembler in places that need it. I understand proper data structures a lot better now (still struggling with tries, but I’ll get it eventually).  I write my code as if I am delivering it to someone else to maintain.  I can’t say that I am ashamed of anything I’ve written past 1997.

I mention all this because the PC Speaker tracker, something that most people bang out in a day, has taken over two weeks and I haven’t written more than 50 lines of code.   What I have done, however, is:

• Spent 3 hours writing up various design and structure ideas in a notes file
• Spent 2 hours last night laying in bed trying to visualize object-oriented tracker design while preventing playback performance from turning to shit (answer: a Song object that controls entering and retrieving note/effect data into the song, and a Player object that retrieves song data one row at a time… still thinking about this one, since a single object makes more sense, but would be harder to virtualize playback methods for other output devices)
• Spent an hour researching the frequency and amplitude characteristics of Vibrato (not just the human voice, but woodwinds and stringed instruments) so I could be sure to make the best use of the effect bits I have available (answer: most pleasing vibrato has a frequency within 4 to 7Hz and amplitude of about 10 cents)
• Spent an hour revisiting various tracker formats, looking for ideas on how to pack notes+volume+effects into two bytes (answer: 7 bits for note, 3 bits for effect, 3 for effect 1st parm, 3 for effect 2nd parm)

…but no code.  Yet.

I believe it was the demogroup Silents who proclaimed, “If you can’t do it better, why do it at all?”  That is simultaneously democoding’s greatest motto, motivator, and curse.