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Admin
Admin
I don't get it.
Admin
Admin
What do I even say to you, huh?
It's... it's like you don't...
You don't...
sigh
Admin
What?! Posting witty remarks on TDWTF doesn't make you cool? Aw man, my reality is shattered...
Admin
Admin
What is really needed here are two assembly language instructions from the early IBM 360 series: DWIM = Do What I Mean and, if you can't DWP = Do What's Possible
Admin
Sounds exactly like something a PHB would say. We have an infiltrator here, people.
Admin
Why be original when it's so much easier to be a shameless hack?
Admin
s/replication/copulation/ and it becomes self-evident.
Admin
"Yields a Daily WTF comment when preceded by its quotation" yields a Daily WTF comment when preceded by its quotation.
Admin
cough Calypso cough
Admin
FTFY
Admin
This reminds me of the Customer-Friendly System as well as a few other articles I've read elsewhere. It makes me sad that such a thing has happened more than once.
Admin
Admin
I believe it's called Generative Programming; that is, a program that produces code itself. That looks more like a Workflow application, like BizTalk or WWF. In any case, it looks poorly thought out.
Admin
Admin
Um.. the flavor text paraphrases the inner-platform effect, but the accompanying image appears to depict a moderately complex state diagram bringing some poor innocent graph visualization module to its knees.
Is there a link missing between those two?
Admin
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Microsoft BizTalk.
Someone post this great WTF over to http://www.wadewegner.com/ ... The poor blind fool needs a wake up call. I'm too lazy and jaded to do it myself.
Admin
When that happens to you, your doctor looks grave and offers up a few options, usually including chemotherapy.
Admin
Amen to that. Supporting user-defined workflows and fields is a desirable feature for our customers, but you really don't want to give them too much power.
Admin
[quote user=OldProgrammer]What is really needed here are two assembly language instructions from the early IBM 360 series: DWIM = Do What I Mean and, if you can't DWP = Do What's Possible[/quote]
Just remember that the DWP instruction can cause unexpected failure.
Admin
I'm sure everyone posting on DailyWTF is really just a sub-personality of Alex.
Admin
[quote user="CrushU"][quote user=OldProgrammer]What is really needed here are two assembly language instructions from the early IBM 360 series: DWIM = Do What I Mean and, if you can't DWP = Do What's Possible[/quote]
Just remember that the DWP instruction can cause unexpected failure.[/quote]
Also remember: HCF is always possible.
Admin
Admin
I've heard that XML is the quine markup!
After all, its human readible and easily edited.
Admin
This doesn't look like an ugly program so much as an ugly graph. It'd probably be quite readable if the nodes were organized better.
Admin
Looks like a Java applications (by look&feel).
Admin
'Sup? Verify.
Admin
Ha! I knew microsoft was behind global warming!
Admin
Highest Common Factor? Not when both arguments are zero.
Admin
[quote user="trtwtf"][quote user="CrushU"][quote user=OldProgrammer]What is really needed here are two assembly language instructions from the early IBM 360 series: DWIM = Do What I Mean and, if you can't DWP = Do What's Possible[/quote]
Just remember that the DWP instruction can cause unexpected failure.[/quote]
Also remember: HCF is always possible. [/quote]
Highest Common Factor? Not when both arguments are zero.
Admin
"sudo" would be more fun if it was replaced with "simonsays"
Admin
Admin
[quote user="QJo"][quote user="trtwtf"][quote user="CrushU"][quote user=OldProgrammer]What is really needed here are two assembly language instructions from the early IBM 360 series: DWIM = Do What I Mean and, if you can't DWP = Do What's Possible[/quote]
Just remember that the DWP instruction can cause unexpected failure.[/quote]
Also remember: HCF is always possible. [/quote]
Highest Common Factor? Not when both arguments are zero.[/quote]
Halt and Catch Fire.
Admin
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die.
Admin
Admin
"Canceled" is the spider in the middle!
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Admin
Ahhh I've seen those before. The application is called Calypso (a multimillion dollar financial markets workstation).
It does allow the user to configure a workflow (think state machine) but the graphical renderer usually doesn't do a good job of laying out your workflow in a logical manner. It would not look as bad if it was laid out properly, though I think this particular config is getting a bit carried away...
Admin
People who are already cool post witty remarks on TDWTF. For examples, examine the remarks from D-Coder.
Admin
It seems apparent here that merely including a recent version of a header does not automatically mean that best use will be made of the associated functionality...
Admin
"The Quine – i.e., a program that produces its own source code as output"
Technically, a completely empty Perl script qualifies under that definition :)
Admin
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Wow, thanks for explaining that for me. Every joke is made so much funnier when someone explains the punch line.
Admin
Sorry, I should have read more posts before making this one. Apparently this point was beaten to death long before I got there. Now I feel guilty, like kicking a guy while he's down. Excuse me while I go to another forum and post some snide remarks about Anthony Weiner ...
Admin
On the serious side, I've seen this done so many times it just gets tedious. Every few weeks, it seems, somebody gets the bright idea: Why should we need programmers with all this special training to write programs? Why don't we just make a super-smart program that will write other programs, and then any end-user can get whatever software they need without programming! Brillant!
Except ... except when you try to implement this, you inevitably discover that you have two choices: (a) Put very sharp limits on what sort of programs the meta-program can write. Like, "Write programs that read a file and produce a report with one line per record in the file, with maybe some totalling or a computed column". This is quickly rejected as inadequate. We need a meta-program that can write ANY sort of program. So we get, (b) The user has to tell the meta-program everything that it needs to do, step by step, in detail. But if the user is going to tell this program everything it needs to do, he has to, well, write a program. So the meta-program ends up being just another programming language to add to the list of all the other programming languages out there.
Sure, it would be cool if we could have computers like on Star Trek, where you just say, "Computer, give me a list of all the planets with intelligent life between here and Vulcan," and the computer just does it without having to write a tedious program.
Maybe some day the technology to do that will be invented. But I seriously question if it's even theoretically possible, because questions like that are filled with inherent ambiguities.
To take that example, there's the obvious question, Exactly what do you mean by 'intelligent life'? How do we define and measure that? Unless someone has already made a list of planets in the galaxy with intelligent life -- in which case the problem is trivial, you're just asking the computer to spit back out a list that you typed in, and the only problem is to identify the file -- you're asking the computer to somehow, on the fly, invent criteria that match what the user has in mind, assuming he has anything firm in mind, and then to collect and analyze data to evaluate it against this criteria.
But even the seemingly easy part of the question involves ambiguity. What do you mean by "between here and the planet Vulcan"? If we draw a straight line between the starship's present location and the location of Vulcan, there are probably no planets that fall exactly on that line. You probably mean something like, Within such-and-such a radius of this line. But what radius? Is it a fixed distance? A fixed travel time? If there is a planet that is a ten-minute trip in the opposite direction from Vulcan, should that be included on the reasoning that we could go there, then turn around and head to Vulcan and still get there sooner than we could take the two-day side trip to the planet that is more strictly "along the way"? Not to mention that the planet Vulcan presumably moves in an orbit. Do you mean between here and where Vulcan is now? Or where it will be at the time we arrive there? If we're light years away this may be a trivial distinction. If we're AU's away it is not.
Etc etc.
One important reason why programming is difficult is because you have to turn vague statements from the user into concrete rules that eliminate all possible ambiguity.
Admin
Yeah, or even besides that totally trivial case, Linux "cat" does that, if given the name of its own source file.
I think they meant something more like, "A program that produces source code meeting the user's requirements without requiring anyone to write code." I don't think the program was supposed to write itself, but to write something else.
Admin
HPPhaserJet:
Which won't be very long seeing as he is burning to death.
HPPHaserJet: can you say "Whooooosh!!!" ?
Admin