• (cs)

    The best article in ages... Brilliant! Very thanks! :)

  • James (unregistered)

    I guess it makes me feel pretty good that, given a similar situation, I would probably be able to tell my boss what was done wrong, and get him to tell the "Developers'" boss, and have it actually fixed. Double-whammy: I work for the government.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that they were using CVS.

  • ysth (unregistered) in reply to htg
    htg:
    I have had to integrate with an externally developed database, and that was a mindfuck - no primary keys - apart from one table, foreign keys not really done (certainly no cascades), no documentation, varchar(1)s for yes/no, etc.

    I thought everyone knew varchar(0) is the One True Boolean.

  • Hognoxious (unregistered) in reply to ysth
    ysth:
    I thought everyone knew varchar(0) is the One True Boolean.
    Only if you can fit fileNotFound in it.
  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to domm
    The & in front of the function call is very Perl4ish (i.e. outdated for at least 10 years).

    We're working on 15 now. Perl 5 was released in 1994.

  • Paolone (unregistered) in reply to Tei
    code that is hard to understand because you use all the sintaxy sugar of the language, and all tricks, and even new tricks you invented. You will make your coworkers live in hell. is bad.
    Any Perl developer worth any money will understand the &procedurename syntax. It's when you see things like: 
    $a = [$a=>$b]->[$a<=$b];

    that you can start being bothered about being too smart.

  • CodeMonkey (unregistered)

    Both the developers and Josh may share some part of the WTF. It is clear that the development team was doing a poor job from a database/application design and properly testing the application. Josh fixed the symptoms of the "software disease" instead of the cause. I hope he tried to raise the issue with the development team and with the PM, but changing the CVS directly without consulting the developer is at minimum rude and provocative. I hope Brian can restore a conversation with the Dev team and work together.

  • (cs) in reply to Brian
    Brian:
    I'm a different 'Brian' than the one in the story... but I feel like my current project could have taken the place. I've been asked to help people do C++, but they insist on doing C+ - and doing it badly. Worse, they *really* only want me to tell them they're doing fine. And I'm not a consultant, I'm an employee hired as a programmer.

    C+?

  • (cs) in reply to chaboud
    chaboud:
    If this number (not the fake number, but the one that "Brian" saw) was Josh's cell number, give the dude a call and ask where he works.

    Yes, but it was almost certainly "Brian"'s desk number.

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