• Shipshape (unregistered)

    Why do they always say "Welcome aboard"? It isn't a ship and you aren't the captain. How about "One to beam up"? That wouldn't be any more corny.

  • Karl (unregistered)

    This just demonstrates once again, if you have a strength, hide it! No one wants to be shown a fool, so everyone will hate you. Keep your skills to yourself and stay in step with the herd.

    I guess that was yesterday's WTF too.

    And the one before.

  • Jack (unregistered)

    I wonder what this would have done:

    <xbobif condition="amount <= eval(system('reboot'))" >

    Assuming that works, methinks the best approach would be to write something that "accidentally" destroys 95% of BobX while erasing its own tracks. Arrange to be nowhere in the vicinity when it goes off, then do your best to help get BobX working again... though, really, what could anyone but Bob be expected to do?

    It may be painful at first, but in the long run, it's For Your Own Good.

  • (cs) in reply to Karl
    Karl:
    I guess that was yesterday's WTF too. 
    while (1)
{
  And the one before.
}

    FTFY

  • alvatrus (unregistered) in reply to Shipshape
    Shipshape:
    Why do they always say "Welcome aboard"? It isn't a ship and you aren't the captain. How about "One to beam up"? That wouldn't be any more corny.
    Because they knew that, in the end, the new guy was going to jump ship.
  • Karl (unregistered) in reply to hymie
    hymie:
    Karl:
    I guess that was yesterday's WTF too. 
    while (1)
{
  And the one before.
}

    FTFY

    Quite correct, good Sir, I do believe you've identified a valid optimization.

    And as the Great Teacher showed us recently, if you're doing the same thing over and over, get a computer to repeat it for you.

  • foo (unregistered)

    The guy built a bastard child of ASP and ColdFusion on top of PHP? I'm surprised the whole thing didn't just implode during the first page hit!

  • Justin (unregistered)

    TRWTF = "Christian"

  • Blakeyrat (unregistered)

    Oh WOOOOOOOOOOOOOW trwtf is not using good articles and instead using old crap we've already seen imean cumon srsly wtf man

  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL (unregistered)

    BobX: for when PHP isn't enough of a WTF.

  • (cs)

    I don't get why anyone sane would work for a place using a proprietary language that only that company uses. As a developer, if you waste 4+ years working with "BobX" and not PHP, how are you ever going to get a PHP job? You'd be laughed out of any interview or dismissed as not having any relevant experience.

    Might as well just work for that company the rest of your life, since if you ever left you'd have to start over from scratch since your career would be tainted by years with some proprietary language nobody else uses.

    Staying in a position like this isn't just a career limited move, it's a career ending move.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to Blakeyrat

    Unless somebody snuck in and changed it in the 10 minutes between when you posted and when I started reading, the article was clearly labeled "Classic WTF," dude.

    CAPTCHA: aptent

    Please be more aptentive in the future. Thanks!

  • the beholder (unregistered) in reply to Blakeyrat
    Blakeyrat:
    Oh WOOOOOOOOOOOOOW trwtf is not using good articles and instead using old crap we've already seen imean cumon srsly wtf man
    Hmmm I wonder what Blakeyrat did to grant himself a Personal Dedicated Troll Impersonator™?
  • (cs)

    Please don't Google "BobX".

  • Blakeyrat (unregistered) in reply to the beholder

    Pdti's aren't cheap, you know?

  • (cs) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    Please don't Google "BobX".

    Please don't push the big red button!

  • harperska (unregistered)

    This sounds creepily like a company I used to work for, so much that I almost think it is talking about the company I used to work for. It is uncannily accurate, including the half-height cube walls and homegrown ERP system. Our 'Bob' was an offsite contractor that nobody had ever met, who possibly lived in a different country. We didn't really know.

    I was planning on only being there a year or so to gain a little experience after college, but then the economy tanked and I was stuck there for 4 years just lucky that they didn't lay anyone off.

    There was one project in the company that had to be developed in Java rather than "BobX", as it had to interface with an external 3rd party application using RMI. I quickly got myself assigned to, and then put in charge of that project just so I could put Java on my resume instead of "BobX". Worked like a charm, and once the economy recovered and companies started hiring again, I was able to get myself a much better job at a Java shop.

  • AC (unregistered)

    This is clearly utter bull and never happened.

  • (cs) in reply to AC
    AC:
    This is clearly utter bull and never happened.

    Totally disagree; there are lots of companies that, for whatever reason, whip up some weird, half-assed homebrew language instead of using existing solutions, and once you end up in a place like that you're pretty much screwed career-wise. Sometimes you get a place like Fog Creek that uses an in-house language for a semi-decent reason (in their case, they sell it to people to install and support Windows via ASP and Linux via PHP, so their in-house language Wasabi is like OOP VBScript that can compile to either) but a place like that also pushes and encourages developers to stay current if they leave.

    On the flipside a place like this slowly kills developers by making them unemployable.

  • Meta-commentator (unregistered)

    Where's my peanut gallery snide comments? Only one in the article. For Shame.

  • John (unregistered)

    Once again the anonymization makes this unbelievable in the real world. Here's what would actually happen:

    Bob's system wouldn't really be named "X", it would be something like "Enterprise Web Deployment Platform", and Bob, being an "offshore resource", would actually be named Rikitikitombohor-h-amirovisanto. Accordingly, the code illustrated as

    <xbobendloop>

    would be written as

    <EWDPRikitikitombohor-h-amirovisantoendloop>

    For extra points, the parser would simply ignore misspellings such as

    <EWDPRikitikitombohor-h-amiravisantoendloop>

    making for some "interesting" debugging opportunities.

  • BAF (unregistered) in reply to harperska

    Eh, it's still Java. I anything is better than BobX, though.

  • marc (unregistered)

    I guess Bob was the smart one here. BobX granted him longlife rent from this company.

  • AnonymouseUser (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    I don't get why anyone sane would work for a place using a proprietary language that only that company uses.

    Depends on the year, though PHP makes it recent-ish. If it was the 70's or even 80's there were plenty of in-house languages or versions of languages, usually optimised for the hardware the company also sold.

  • d (unregistered) in reply to Shipshape
    Shipshape:
    Why do they always say "Welcome aboard"? It isn't a ship and you aren't the captain. How about "One to beam up"? That wouldn't be any more corny.
    Because it is preferable to "Abandon hope all ye who enter here".
  • OldCoder (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    AC:
    This is clearly utter bull and never happened.

    Totally disagree; there are lots of companies that, for whatever reason, whip up some weird, half-assed homebrew language instead of using existing solutions, and once you end up in a place like that you're pretty much screwed career-wise. Sometimes you get a place like Fog Creek that uses an in-house language for a semi-decent reason (in their case, they sell it to people to install and support Windows via ASP and Linux via PHP, so their in-house language Wasabi is like OOP VBScript that can compile to either) but a place like that also pushes and encourages developers to stay current if they leave.

    On the flipside a place like this slowly kills developers by making them unemployable.

    Yup. I contracted at one place for a year that used their own in-house dialect of Basic to access a database using their own in-house API.

    Fortunately, behind the scenes the code was C/C++ which meant that my time there wasn't completely wasted, but all that weirdo other stuff took some time to get used to and was never going to be of help to me anywhere else.

    Captcha: eros. You have to be kidding!

  • Wyrm (unregistered) in reply to Shipshape
    Shipshape:
    Why do they always say "Welcome aboard"? It isn't a ship and you aren't the captain. How about "One to beam up"? That wouldn't be any more corny.
    More like... why would you say "welcome aboard" when you're boarding a sinking ship?
  • (cs) in reply to Jack
    Jack:
    I wonder what this would have done: <xbobif condition="amount <= eval(system('reboot'))" >

    Assuming that works, methinks the best approach would be to write something that "accidentally" destroys 95% of BobX while erasing its own tracks. Arrange to be nowhere in the vicinity when it goes off, then do your best to help get BobX working again... though, really, what could anyone but Bob be expected to do?

    It may be painful at first, but in the long run, it's For Your Own Good.

    That works fine until bob dumps a backup of bobx back on his servers. All you have done is cost the company 24 hours at best. At least thats the way it would be if bob is as paranoid as i am. I do believe he is.

  • (cs) in reply to AnonymouseUser
    AnonymouseUser:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    I don't get why anyone sane would work for a place using a proprietary language that only that company uses.

    Depends on the year, though PHP makes it recent-ish. If it was the 70's or even 80's there were plenty of in-house languages or versions of languages, usually optimised for the hardware the company also sold.

    Maybe back then but in the modern age I can't think of any reason why anyone who didn't plan to retire at that company would accept a job where you aren't learning transferrable skills. Maybe if you learn a unique domain and can transfer careers to that, but if you plan to stay a developer you're essentially terminating your career by working in a place like that. Maybe if you're desperate or need a job for income, but leave ASAP once you find out the WTF.

  • Unysis BOMBER (unregistered) in reply to marc

    VERY TRUE!! I bet ya Bob-O had more than just one company on the bluff and was not in some cave or abandon nuke site; kickin' it on the cool waves of some sandy beach somewhere gigglin' his ass off.

  • Barf 4Eva (unregistered) in reply to Shipshape
    Shipshape:
    Why do they always say "Welcome aboard"? It isn't a ship and you aren't the captain. How about "One to beam up"? That wouldn't be any more corny.

    Or at least "Welcome To Hell".

    Should be accurate, especially for bobx.

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to Shipshape

    Couldn't agree more. I love it when there is no plan for orientation they just kind of point you at a cubicle and go away. A few hours later your boss comes around and asks "How do you like it so far?" "Umm, if I had a login and some sort of idea what I was supposed to be doing fine I guess" :)

  • Mike (unregistered)

    I'm guilty of this. Back in the day I started with a non-C like language. So one of my first projects (more of a learning exercise but still) was making a parser for G++. G++ was just like C++ except you didn't need to end statments with a semi-colon and if I recall correctly you ended an if/for etc with an "end" statement.

    if(this == that) printf("Moo Ha ha") end

    would be converted into C++ and then compiled with VC++ 6.0 I believe it was at the time. Now I'm so used to the semi-colon that I find myself using it when I'm doing vb coding every once and a while.

  • Eion (unregistered)

    BobX looks almost identical to phpbb.

    I had a job maintaining a phpbb forum and adding new features and layout. In the end these template languages and frameworks just get in the way and slow you down.

  • (cs)

    I think in the phrase "evil, twisted, or evil and twisted", the AND should be in all caps for emphasis. Or maybe emphasized in some other way, though I'm not sure how you'd do that in HTML.

    Also, Oxford comma for the win!

  • trh5y4y54 (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    As a developer, if you waste 4+ years working with "BobX" and not PHP, how are you ever going to get a PHP job?
    So in your world you can only ever get a job doing exactly the same thing as whatever job you had before? Better make sure you don't start off as a paperboy or something....
  • Chelloveck (unregistered) in reply to AnonymouseUser
    AnonymouseUser:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    I don't get why anyone sane would work for a place using a proprietary language that only that company uses.

    Depends on the year, though PHP makes it recent-ish. If it was the 70's or even 80's there were plenty of in-house languages or versions of languages, usually optimised for the hardware the company also sold.

    Aye. I started at Motorola's cellular group in the late 80s where we had something called "MPL" -- "Motorola Programming Language". This was a pessimizing compiler; it would always generate the worst possible assembly. Supposedly there was a new version of MPL languishing on a tape somewhere that produced much better code. But, it didn't reproduce the bugs of the original version, so we were never able to upgrade to it.

    Ah, those were the days...

  • (cs) in reply to trh5y4y54
    trh5y4y54:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    As a developer, if you waste 4+ years working with "BobX" and not PHP, how are you ever going to get a PHP job?
    So in your world you can only ever get a job doing exactly the same thing as whatever job you had before? Better make sure you don't start off as a paperboy or something....

    Have you worked in development? That certainly seems to be how it works, because everyone wants professional experience with the tools they use and unless you are very lucky, you won't be called in for an interview if you don't have the right buzzwords. That means if you're a Java dev its VERY hard to get a job in a C# shop unless you've also worked as a C# dev, and vice versa.

    To spend years on a proprietary language no one but some random nobody company uses is a death sentence; even if you are an accomplished programmer in other languages, you'll be filtered out by HR drones and recruiters (rightly or wrongly) because your recent work experience isn't relevant. Unless you learn some specific domain knowledge you can leverage, you're screwed.

    That's been my experience, anyways. Have 4 years of C# experience? Good luck applying for a PHP or Java or Ruby job, even if you know PHP/Java/Ruby from personal projects. Have 4 years in "BobX"? You aren't going to get past HR at all because it looks to them like you haven't been using C#/Java/PHP/Ruby/whatever in years.

  • (cs) in reply to the beholder
    the beholder:
    Hmmm I wonder what Blakeyrat did to grant himself a Personal Dedicated Troll Impersonator™?
    I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner. I'm also surprised that the impersonator isn't very good at it.
  • CodeBeater (unregistered)

    C'mon Mike, already getting lazy of making the classic headers? (or maybe you just run out of excuses)

    Captcha: eros <=== Captcha recycling?

  • Tom (unregistered) in reply to Mike
    Mike:
    Couldn't agree more. I love it when there is no plan for orientation they just kind of point you at a cubicle and go away. A few hours later your boss comes around and asks "How do you like it so far?" "Umm, if I had a login and some sort of idea what I was supposed to be doing fine I guess" :)
    A few hours???!! I worked at a place where it was routine to wait two weeks for a new login account to be created. No one seemed to think that was odd. Yet, they kept hiring contractors like their money had an expiration date and they better spend it now. Yes, contractors who would get a dollar a minute to sit there doing nothing until their accounts were ready. "Here, read some manuals or something..."
  • Blakeyrat (unregistered) in reply to PedanticCurmudgeon
    PedanticCurmudgeon:
    the beholder:
    Hmmm I wonder what Blakeyrat did to grant himself a Personal Dedicated Troll Impersonator™?
    I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner. I'm also surprised that the impersonator isn't very good at it.

    And I suppose you could do it fucking better? Its not fucking hard to fucking pepper your posts with the word fuck you idiot. If you have a problem just fucking be an internet tough guy you fucking wank. Don't forget to include: windows sucks Linux sucks Mac sucks fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck oracle sucks.

  • Jazz (unregistered) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    Please don't Google "BobX".

    I love that the page title at bobx.com is "You are now in the DARK" -- just like the protagonist in this story, I guess.

  • Jazz (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    Have you worked in development? That certainly seems to be how it works, because everyone wants professional experience with the tools they use and unless you are very lucky, you won't be called in for an interview if you don't have the right buzzwords.

    Don't forget how all of the positions are for "entry-level programmers" with a minimum of "five years of experience."

    It takes a special kind of stupid to write those kinds of requirements. Has any HR worker ever spent the twelve calories and six brain cells that it would take to realize that, if it requires five years of experience, it's not an entry-level job?

  • (cs) in reply to Blakeyrat
    Blakeyrat:
    And I suppose you could do it fucking better? Its not fucking hard to fucking pepper your posts with the word fuck you idiot. If you have a problem just fucking be an internet tough guy you fucking wank. Don't forget to include: windows sucks Linux sucks Mac sucks fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck oracle sucks.
    You can't see the forest for the trees. To be a good Blakeyrat impersonator, it's not enough to say "fuck" every other word and to say that Linux sucks. You have to understand why he does that and why he thinks Linux (but really everything command-line) sucks. Go back to the sidebar and read his posts until you do.
  • Nagesh (unregistered) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    Please don't Google "BobX".
    Hmm, I dunno. Is a tidy little miracle of lucidity compared to Time Cube.

    (Because that's the only nice thing I can think of to say about it. Keeping up the Christmas spirit, folks!)

  • Uncle Al (unregistered) in reply to Tom
    Tom:
    Yet, they kept hiring contractors like their money had an expiration date and they better spend it now.

    Sadly, in many corporations, it would be because the department's money had an end-of-fiscal-year expiration date and, if it wasn't all spent, the following year's budget would be cut to what the department "actually" needed. "Brewster's Millions" is scarily close to reality in some ways. :-)

  • iWantToKeepAnon (unregistered)

    Obviously a brilliant man ahead of his time. I think Bob invented the DSL and the company must be better off for it. :-|

    CAPTCHA: pecus - not even going to look that one up.

  • (cs) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    I don't get why anyone sane would work for a place using a proprietary language that only that company uses. As a developer, if you waste 4+ years working with "BobX" and not PHP, how are you ever going to get a PHP job? You'd be laughed out of any interview or dismissed as not having any relevant experience.

    Might as well just work for that company the rest of your life, since if you ever left you'd have to start over from scratch since your career would be tainted by years with some proprietary language nobody else uses.

    Staying in a position like this isn't just a career limited move, it's a career ending move.

    Don't be silly, you just say you have e.g. "n years working on PHP applications".

  • (cs) in reply to Wyrm
    Wyrm:
    Shipshape:
    Why do they always say "Welcome aboard"? It isn't a ship and you aren't the captain. How about "One to beam up"? That wouldn't be any more corny.
    More like... why would you say "welcome aboard" when you're boarding a sinking ship?
    "I'm glad you arrived, your arse is just the right shape to plug this hole we've got in the hull. Sit right there ..."

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