• jmike (unregistered)

    public interface GenericFrist { postComment(null); }

  • Frz (unregistered)

    So TRWTF is that Sergio can't work out how the application wokrs from the source and now tries to contact people who might have worked on it a decade ago? Smart move.

  • (cs)

    Unexpected end of file.

  • (cs)

    TRWTF is that he went to madrid without even calling/mailing first, no wonder he got tossed on his ass

  • (cs)

    Pay no attention to that consulting firm behind the curtain!

  • Mads Lie Jensen (unregistered)

    Was he carrying a clue-bat?

  • (cs)

    Even if he found them, why would have they paid him attention? After all he's their replacement.

  • np (unregistered)

    Just fix the code. Do a bit of profiling of what is slowing it down and fix it. Rinse-repeat a couple times and call it a day.

    He'd be done sooner than the trip going to Madrid. It isn't like they told him the app is broken. It is just slow, getting slower.

  • nimis (unregistered) in reply to np
    np:
    It isn't like they told him the app is broken. It is just slow, getting slower.

    Maybe he should have a look at the log file. Is might have become quite big after ten years. And appending stuff would then require an increasing amount of time.

  • Jimmy the Kid (unregistered)

    TRWTF is Sergio and this story. What else did he expect from going to Madrid? And what's wrong with a desk, chair and PC in an office. Why is it barren? Did he expect to inherit other people's stuff?

    Check the PC for doco that isnt embedded in code, and rewrite sections as needed. Geez, one would think he's never worked on a legacy system before.

  • (cs) in reply to ratchet freak
    ratchet freak:
    TRWTF is that he went to madrid without even calling/mailing first, no wonder he got tossed on his ass
    I'm suspecting that's made up, given the reference to Quixote. As you may know, Quixote storms a windmill that he imagines to be giants.
  • q.kontinuum (unregistered)

    Would be interesting to see if the log file contains any entries of the type "Error getting method getCodigo for class"

  • (cs) in reply to Jimmy the Kid
    Jimmy the Kid:
    TRWTF is Sergio and this story. What else did he expect from going to Madrid? And what's wrong with a desk, chair and PC in an office. Why is it barren? Did he expect to inherit other people's stuff?

    Check the PC for doco that isnt embedded in code, and rewrite sections as needed. Geez, one would think he's never worked on a legacy system before.

    Call me crazy but my guess is that a company that would over-engineer simple method calls to use reflection instead would feel they don't need to document things either.

    Your other comments are probably comments to the writer, not the submitter. This site tries to be funny beyond the actual story itself and sometimes that seems to backfire.

  • (cs) in reply to NMe
    NMe:
    The writers on this site try to be funny beyond the actual story itself and that backfires every damn time. DEAR GOD MAKE THE FORCED HUMOUR STOP

    FTFY

  • Scourge of programmers. (unregistered) in reply to Jimmy the Kid
    Jimmy the Kid:
    doco

    Seriously, that's a word now?

  • Bob (unregistered)

    We're still left hanging on TRWTF, cases include: 1/ Sergio can't use Blame 2/ Casa de Quixote didn't use version control That said, if the culprit is right there in the first commit (whenever it happens) then you just have to suck it up and roll with it.

    "In the beginning, the Code was without form, and void."

  • (cs) in reply to The_Assimilator
    The_Assimilator:
    NMe:
    The writers on this site try to be funny beyond the actual story itself and that backfires every damn time. DEAR GOD MAKE THE FORCED HUMOUR STOP

    FTFY

    Just your average Erik Gern article. At least it's not a Hanzo story or the one with the painful Cold War metaphors.

  • foo AKA fooo (unregistered) in reply to lucidfox
    lucidfox:
    Just your average Erik Gern article. At least it's not a Hanzo story or the one with the painful Cold War metaphors.
    So now with forced quixotic metaphors, well ...

    Hey Erik, La Mancha is really in central Spain! What's wrong with your fake geography today?

  • Keith (unregistered)

    When you got an application that performs slowly what do you do: A) Wade around the codebase looking for anything that might look a bit fishy. B) Use a profiling tool to identify where the bottleneck really is?

  • Pock Suppet (unregistered)

    No comments about TRWTF being the mix of English, Spanish, and combined-English-and-Spanish method names? Although I suppose TRWTF is how normal^H^H^H^H^H^Hfamiliar that codebase sounds to me.

  • (cs) in reply to Pock Suppet

    Having worked with foreign-language code-bases in the past, this is pretty standard. Since the keywords tend to remain in English, people will mix-and-match languages all the time.

  • Doodpants (unregistered) in reply to Scourge of programmers.
    Scourge of programmers.:
    Jimmy the Kid:
    doco

    Seriously, that's a word now?

    Apparently you can abbreviate any noun by appending an "o" to the first syllable. "Computer" becomes "Compo". "Raspberries" becomes "Raspbo". "Antidisestablismentarianism" becomes "Anto". It works with anything!

  • foo AKA fooo (unregistered) in reply to Doodpants
    Doodpants:
    Scourge of programmers.:
    Jimmy the Kid:
    doco

    Seriously, that's a word now?

    Apparently you can abbreviate any noun by appending an "o" to the first syllable. "Computer" becomes "Compo". "Raspberries" becomes "Raspbo". "Antidisestablismentarianism" becomes "Anto". It works with anything!
    Even with names, doesn't it, Eriko?

  • That Guy (unregistered) in reply to foo AKA fooo
    foo AKA fooo:
    Doodpants:
    Scourge of programmers.:
    Jimmy the Kid:
    doco

    Seriously, that's a word now?

    Apparently you can abbreviate any noun by appending an "o" to the first syllable. "Computer" becomes "Compo". "Raspberries" becomes "Raspbo". "Antidisestablismentarianism" becomes "Anto". It works with anything!
    Even with names, doesn't it, Eriko?

    Should be "Ero" ?

  • (cs) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    Having worked with foreign-language code-bases in the past, this is pretty standard. Since the keywords tend to remain in English, people will mix-and-match languages all the time.
    Even if they didn't, get and set are special as they're part of the JavaBean standard.
  • (cs) in reply to Jimmy the Kid
    Jimmy the Kid:
    TRWTF is Sergio and this story. What else did he expect from going to Madrid? And what's wrong with a desk, chair and PC in an office. Why is it barren? Did he expect to inherit other people's stuff?
    Just their docs, I guess.
  • (cs) in reply to Doodpants
    Doodpants:
    Scourge of programmers.:
    Jimmy the Kid:
    doco

    Seriously, that's a word now?

    Apparently you can abbreviate any noun by appending an "o" to the first syllable. "Computer" becomes "Compo". "Raspberries" becomes "Raspbo". "Antidisestablismentarianism" becomes "Anto". It works with anything!
    If "Raspberries" becomes "Raspbo" let me try this with "Raspberry Pi": ... becomes "Raspbo Pio" - hm not really shorter, maybe give it a second try: "Raspberry Pi" becomes "Rio" - yeah, that's shorter and it sounds like the geography from the story.

  • (cs) in reply to Jimmy the Kid
    Jimmy the Kid:
    Check the PC for doco that isnt embedded in code, and rewrite sections as needed.
    TRWTF is people who call documentation "doco".
  • YellowOnline (unregistered)

    "dÈmodÈ"? "démodé"!

    Bad code is still worse, but spelling errors in comments are annoying too.

  • Paul M (unregistered)

    Gasp! No javadocs?

    You know as well as I do what happens when you decree that every method must be javadoced:

    /**

    • get the foo.
    • @return value of foo. */

    public int getFoo();

    /**

    • set the foo
    • @param foo the value of foo. */

    public void setFoo(int foo);

    But yes - calling everything via reflection absolutely sounds like some dumbass corporate coding standard. Possibly they were having classloader issues caused by a broken build/deploy process. Or maybe someone simply decided that it was more flexible and dynamic.

  • slicer (unregistered)

    I worked for a rather large tax preparation firm and we had hired an offshore consulting firm to integrate financial advice into the tax experience. The consulting firm, as one might expect, handed us back something ridiculously slow. As it turns out, they wrote all their methods to take a single string parameter and return a single string parameter: XML. Each method unpacked incoming data from it and then packaged up return data. At least they got to bypass all that slow parameter checking the language would normally enforce!

    Captcha: iusto. iusto threw up in my mouth a little having the relive this.

  • F (unregistered) in reply to Scourge of programmers.
    Scourge of programmers.:
    Jimmy the Kid:
    doco

    Seriously, that's a word now?

    It's four letters, including two vowels. Of course it's a word. What language it belongs to is anyone's guess - though I wouldn't be surprised to see it as the CAPTCHA.

  • (cs) in reply to YellowOnline
    YellowOnline:
    "dÈmodÈ"? "démodé"!

    Bad code is still worse, but spelling errors in comments are annoying too.

    Grammar-nazism is SO dÈmodÈ.

  • (cs)

    If the reflection was the cause of the slowdown, the application would have been slow from the start. It would have been worse still on 2004 (or 1994) hardware.

    Obviously, something else is the cause.

  • Anon (unregistered)
    Casa de Quixote couldn't afford new equipment, which required frequent restarts

    The new equipment would requite frequent restarts? I wouldn't buy that shit either.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Keith
    Keith:
    When you got an application that performs slowly what do you do: A) Wade around the codebase looking for anything that might look a bit fishy. B) Use a profiling tool to identify where the bottleneck really is?

    C) Fly to Madrid on the company's dime in a vain attempt to track down the original developers and have them explain it to you because apparently you are too fucking stupid to work it out yourself.

    Apparently Casa de Quixote's ability to evaluate developers technical skills hasn't improved any.

  • Carrie (unregistered) in reply to F
    F:
    Scourge of programmers.:
    Jimmy the Kid:
    doco

    Seriously, that's a word now?

    It's four letters, including two vowels. Of course it's a word. What language it belongs to is anyone's guess - though I wouldn't be surprised to see it as the CAPTCHA.

    Google translate, for what that's worth, won't detect a language but translates it to 'Doc', apparently as in the slang term for doctor, if you select Bosnian as the source language.

  • Carrie (unregistered) in reply to Carrie

    That was a little premature of me. A little further down the list of languages, and translating it from Latin to English yeilds 'teaches' - so yes, we may well see it as the captcha!

  • Alex (unregistered)

    I was waiting for Dulcinea to make an appearence

  • Kevin (unregistered) in reply to Keith
    Keith:
    When you got an application that performs slowly what do you do: A) Wade around the codebase looking for anything that might look a bit fishy. B) Use a profiling tool to identify where the bottleneck really is?
    Trick question.

    C) Track down the original developers and demand they create documentation for you! Or else!!

  • Slapout (unregistered)

    I think the ending is missing:

    A few minutes later Sergio awoke from his slummber. Glancing at the clock indicated that 10 minutes had passed. He looked to the screen. The app was still loading.

  • anonymous (unregistered)

    I believe the reflection stupidity part, but the whole "track-down-the-original-developers-in-Madrid" is pure story bloat!

    The original developers were idiots, period! Just scrap all the useless code, improve whatever you can and move on.

    If someone wrote something as stupid as this reflection scheme, would anyone reasonably believe that it would be any good getting in contact with the said person? Only two scenarios are possible if you ever get an answer: "Neat, huh?" (in this case, the guy is still as dumb as always) or "I'm really sorry, man! I was totally inexperienced, and thought it was a good idea..." (the guy learned his lession, but the code is crap because it is).

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Casa de Quixote couldn't afford new equipment, which required frequent restarts

    The new equipment would requite frequent restarts? I wouldn't buy that shit either.

    That part confused me, too.

    And I was half expecting "ToString" instead of "toString."

  • garaden (unregistered) in reply to NMe
    NMe:
    Call me crazy but my guess is that a company that would over-engineer simple method calls to use reflection instead would feel they don't need to document things either.

    No, no, you see, the reflection is the documentation. "Oh, don't worry, we use this highly standard framework. It's self-documenting!"

    CAPTCHA: saepius. Don't bother using your Homo saepius brain; let the pattern do the thinking for you.

  • (cs)

    Is this a Don Quixote story?

    It seems like it must be a take-off at least, because he's certainly on a useless chivalric mission...

  • GenericDao (unregistered) in reply to Pastebreath
    Pastebreath:
    Even if he found them, why would have they paid him attention? After all he's their replacement.

    Show me the money!

  • (cs) in reply to YellowOnline
    YellowOnline:
    "dÈmodÈ"? "démodé"!

    Bad code is still worse, but spelling errors in comments are annoying too.

    Being French, I've seen that one quite a lot. I say it's a mild case of mojibake rather than a real spelling error.

  • (cs) in reply to Doodpants
    Doodpants:
    Scourge of programmers.:
    Jimmy the Kid:
    doco

    Seriously, that's a word now?

    Apparently you can abbreviate any noun by appending an "o" to the first syllable. "Computer" becomes "Compo". "Raspberries" becomes "Raspbo". "Antidisestablismentarianism" becomes "Anto". It works with anything!

    A recent fad in the UK was to create a nickname for someone by taking the first two (or three) letters of their first name and concatenate them with the first two (or three) letters of their last name.

    Hence you get such delights as:

    • SuBo (Susan Boyle)
    • BoJo (Boris Johnson)
    • SamCam (Samantha Cameron)

    Rumour has it that Pete Doherty was not a big fan of this craze.

  • Scourge of Programmers (unregistered)

    A programmer with courage? That's new.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    I believe the reflection stupidity part, but the whole "track-down-the-original-developers-in-Madrid" is pure story bloat!

    The original developers were idiots, period! Just scrap all the useless code, improve whatever you can and move on.

    If someone wrote something as stupid as this reflection scheme, would anyone reasonably believe that it would be any good getting in contact with the said person? Only two scenarios are possible if you ever get an answer: "Neat, huh?" (in this case, the guy is still as dumb as always) or "I'm really sorry, man! I was totally inexperienced, and thought it was a good idea..." (the guy learned his lession, but the code is crap because it is).

    I agree with this so thoroughly that I almost could've written it myself. It's exactly the same reaction I had. But I'm pretty sure I'd remember writing it if I'd done that, and I don't, so I'm pretty sure I didn't. Same name, though. Probably some guy pretending to be me. He's sure got me pegged.

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