Looking for general advice on complex program

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 1:33 PM, Josh English
<Joshua.R.English at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sadly, I'm the type of guy who almost has to re-invent the wheel. When I started XML processing, it was on an old computer and I couldn't get things like lxml to work, or understand the ones I did manage to install. To fully understand XML processing and validating, I had to write my own XML validation utility.
>

Actually, this isn't a bad thing. Writing your own XML validator is an
excellent way to gain proper comprehension of XML. Look up all the
specifications and be sure that your parser complies with them, and
you'll truly understand what XML is all about.

For production code, it's often better to take a ready-made solution,
if only to save you the trouble of coding it. But for learning, taking
someone else's code can lead to black-box mentality - "I push this in
here and I get that out there" - which can lead to all sorts of
ridiculous piles of overlaid protocols. Yes, I've seen some pretty
dumb stuff floating around!

ChrisA