Comment by sixtyj
4 days ago
Why are we alive? To be useful. Not happy all the kind. Everyone wants to be useful.
I am not doing anything special but I do inform our community (“mankind”) for 25 years… And I feel useful because I am good at it.
“Mankind” can be a group of other people.
Edit: What people value the most? Compliments. So if you are useful and receive compliments, you will eventually be happy. But ofc you can be happy without being useful, for sure.
I am not doing anything special
Least surprising thing you've said so far.
but I do inform our community
Inform them what? "You there, this project you've worked on, learned from, gotten joy from, been complimented on by your peers...I, with my 25 years of peerless wisdom, find it useless and you should feel bad for doing it"?
Sure...you're a real people person.
to be useful to whom, exactly?
To other people, of course.
OP has done more to be useful to other people than you did in this particular thread. Ok, so what if it has been done many times before, this is his, it may not be perfect and it may not be immediately useful to you. But it increased his knowledge and he shipped, which is more than I can say for 95% of my own projects, so that's impressive by itself. He also opened himself up to criticism and takes it all in stride, which is another fairly scary but powerful thing to do.
Fun fact: I've built something very much like this that powered a number of programs that I sold over the years and it was written when I wasn't nearly as good of a programmer as I am now (take off 30 years of additional experience). If I look at OP's code there are a whole raft of nitpicks but there isn't anything immediately and obviously wrong with it and just speaking for myself, that is surprising because most people's C code is - and I'm being generous here - absolutely terrible. This has potential, but I'd have to really dig in to see how solid it is and I don't have time for that right now, but I've seen far worse code than this.