[TechSucks] Hack value over sanity
Recently I've been part of a discussion about parsing TTY output (with the little escape sequences and all) from the game of nethack for a bot (not that it hasn't been done already).
I've tried to bring a bit of sanity to that discussion by voting for implementing an interface for bots instead (my suggestion was a TCP connection and speaking some XML). The other party thought that it would be stupid(!) to do this because the other interface is already there.
I'd agree were nethack a closed source game where you have no choice but using hardly parsable interfaces. But - hello? - it's an open source game with the cleanest code I've seen so far. Where's the reason of not creating a sane interface?
Ah, I see. Hack value. Stroking your ego by showing off your coding/parsing skills.
No wonder so much stuff is next to unusable for non-hackers.
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