Table Of Specification: Fill & Download for Free

It wouldn't make any sense to count up. When the announcer says 10, they are saying there are 10 seconds until the time of liftoff. When they say 9, they are saying there are 9 seconds until the time of liftoff. 8 seconds. 7 seconds. 6 seconds on down to 1 second.The count actually starts several hours earlier. We have a long table of actions that have to be performed by people on the launch team. Those actions happen at specific times before liftoff.

This is a table of contents.You’ll notice that there are named section headers for various sections to neatly arrange and organize the book.You’ll notice the author didn’t put all of the text of his book inside the table of contents. Then why do we do this in programs? (that is: why do we put all of our code in one place?)In programming “we” have a tendency to put all of our code inside the “table of contents” instead of organizing our thoughts. Why? All the people here answering “functions are for re-usability, so you don’t repeat code.” are in fact correct, but there are many more valid reasons to segregate your code, much like a table of contents.For example, clearly this book is about fishing, just from the table of contents, but if I need to know more about Lures, I know exactly where to look. In programming, if I have a function named “getAllUserNamesUpperCased(users);” I know that this function extracts all user names from users, regardless of the data type, and that they will be upper cased. If that is in fact all the function does, I know that the bug breaking the users age is going to be somewhere else. Perhaps something to the effect of : “getUsersAge(users);” (notice that in both instances they’re easier than trying to parse every single “for(int i = 0; i < users….)” because they’re named! They were given a label telling me exactly what data I’m interested in. A for loop can’t necessarily do that by itself.)Imagine if you will, that all of the text from the section about salmon fishing was slapped in the middle of the boat fishing section. Now the author knows that salmon and boat fishing can only be done in the summer, so he put all of that inside the summer fishing section. How easy do you think it would be to find the page about Salmon Fishing, lost somewhere without a section header? The author organized his thoughts into categories, where each thought can be paired with other relevant thoughts, making it easier to understand for the reader. We should do this with our code.Your functions should read like a table of contents. In the following code example, you can probably tell that I’m running a graphical application that depends on the Operating System just by reading this next block of code. Imagine what this function would look like if I had to get registry information, read the date and time, send a request to some server, call a stack of OpenGL functions bootstrapping the graphics library (which is usually dozens of lines of code).function main()  {  InitializeStartingValues();  var osValues = GetOperatingSystemEnvironmentVariables();  var context = StartGraphicsBootstrapProcess(osValues);  MainOperatingLoop(context);  } ^^This main function reads like a table of contents. I know what kind of program this is, I know what the function is doing at a high level, and I know where to look if I am trying to look for some specific code, because its so well organized! If I’m interested in why my graphics library isn’t starting correctly, I know where to look. If I need to look at drivers issues, that’s likely in the GetOperatingSystem… Otherwise if there is some problem with the core features/business logic of the program, that’s all likely inside the MainOperatingLoop somewhere.And guess what? It’s the same all the way down. All the way until the lowest levels of code, you functions will look like tables of contents, making it incredibly easy to understand what all of your code does at every level!THAT is why we use functions.

The Stanley ParableIf you, at any point in time during the game, type sv_cheats 1 in the console, you instantly get teleported to this room.The narrator, after discovering that the player has done this dastardly act, says this:“Stanley. This is me being serious. In fact this is my serious room. It’s where I come to be serious. That table is the most serious table I could find. I looked at many, many tables. Hundreds of tables. It’s possible I looked at over a thousand tables, I honestly don’t know, the specific number of tables I looked at isn’t as important as the understanding that of all the tables that I looked at, this one is the most serious. I relate this story to impress upon you the extent to which this is the most serious room I have, which is why I’ve brought you here. You just tried to activate server cheats, which of course runs the risk of breaking the entire game. You’ve got no respect for the strict order of specific narrative events and I just can’t have that. It’s time to get serious Stanley, no jokes, no games. Outside of this room I might be more tolerant of those things, but now we’re in the room. Which is why I’m subjecting you to the most serious punishment I can think of: One hundred, billion, trillion years standing here in the serious room. Perhaps after that we can talk about the severity of your actions and whether you’ve learned anything, but until then, serious room. GO.”If you try to continue to use cheats he continues on and you actually cannot leave the room unless you restart the game.Edit: Thanks for 1,000 upvotes! For somebody with merely 10 followers this means a ton to me. Well, maybe half a ton.