The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

geoffrey:
The submitter fails to mention whether or not the code in question worked. If it does/did, then it should not matter how it is implemented.
A WTF is product that does not work, not code that doesn't meet the personal aesthetics of a particular programmer.

I'm sad that no-one else has risen to your trolling, so allow me.

On behalf of every single code monkey who has ever had to do code maintenance... you are an idiot. Don't treat code as a write-only medium; it will need to be read and understood in the future. Unless of course your work is utterly worthless and never seen or used by anyone other than yourself, in which case you deserve everything you've got.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Ralph:
Programmers who indulge their compulsions of misplaced "coolness" over actual usefulness need to be sent to another planet, preferably one without air. And that includes 99.44% of so called "web developers" who only know how to do client side code.

Don't presume too much, they don't know how to do client side code.

Just take a look at any website today, people in the web dev business can't code for shit, they don't even get HTML and CSS right --

SQLDave · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

da Doctah:
If I may be so adventurous as to turn against the prevailing tide of this thread and mention the actual content of the opening post....
I once had the pleasure of working with a text editor that had apparently been designed by several groups who didn't often communicate with one another. One group had assumed the paradigm in which the text remained stationary and the user's viewpoint scrolled in front of it, while the other had decided that the window remained in place while the text scrolled behind it.

The result was that by repeatedly scrolling "up", you would eventually arrive at the "bottom" of the file.

That's because the universe is circular.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Gibbon1:
geoffrey:
Abbas:
I increasingly get the impression that (at least) 90% of the kids here have never actually worked on real systems (maybe they're the web devs mentioned earlier, who knows). Then I realise it's really a much higher percentage....

You are probably right. Many of these maverick web programmers think it's so easy to manage REAL enterprise development. They don't know what it's like in the real world where there is little room for petty ideals.

That's somewhat my impression. The comment about the programmer not understanding function parameters starts making me think the original code was written for a microprocessor with very little RAM and or no stack. In those situations you end up with code like that. And often the person writing it isn't really an experienced programmer. Yet, crappy as it is, the code probably worked, shipped and made money. Which for me is the true test.

Ridiculous! If we took you seriously, by that definition Microsoft would be a good software company.

bjolling · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Gunslinger:
qwerty:
I call BS. Nobody would name their kid Aargle.

They didn't. The doctor misspelled Argyle.

Maybe he was dictating it.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Ralph:
Gibbon1:
geoffrey:
Abbas:
I increasingly get the impression that (at least) 90% of the kids here have never actually worked on real systems (maybe they're the web devs mentioned earlier, who knows). Then I realise it's really a much higher percentage....

You are probably right. Many of these maverick web programmers think it's so easy to manage REAL enterprise development. They don't know what it's like in the real world where there is little room for petty ideals.

That's somewhat my impression. The comment about the programmer not understanding function parameters starts making me think the original code was written for a microprocessor with very little RAM and or no stack. In those situations you end up with code like that. And often the person writing it isn't really an experienced programmer. Yet, crappy as it is, the code probably worked, shipped and made money. Which for me is the true test.
Ridiculous! If we took you seriously, by that definition Microsoft would be a good software company.

I guess it depends on what your definition of "good" is. If it means "makes useful software for billions of people worldwide," then I'd say they're one of the best. If your definition is some obscure set of conditions about which only a few care, then maybe they're not.

Silfax · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

The poop of DOOM:
AdamJS:
You know, I would assume that there would already exist a tool for dealing specifically with these situations.
That'd be Excel, then export it as CSV, followed by running it through one of the various CSV to XML convertors available,

You forgot - printing out the xml, placing it on a wooden table, photographing it, scanning the printed photo, storing the digital image in a database, then extracting the image and passing it thru some ocr software

then parsing that XML in your code.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
These "modestly complex" functions are, compared to some code I've had the misfortune to work with, models of simplicity. 10 to 40 lines? Mere nothings. I've seen functions with 2500 lines, in 1.6MB source files...

My personal favorite was an 8,000+ line switch statement in a project I used to work on.

Pim · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

geoffrey:
Ralph:
Ridiculous! If we took you seriously, by that definition Microsoft would be a good software company.
I guess it depends on what your definition of "good" is. If it means "makes useful software for billions of people worldwide," then I'd say they're one of the best. If your definition is some obscure set of conditions about which only a few care, then maybe they're not.

We may be only a few, but we're slowly growing in numbers! And one day, we'll make our move! And we will declare Microsoft obsolete! And we will take over the world!

Huh, ehm, oh, I can dream can't I.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

L.:
Ralph:
Programmers who indulge their compulsions of misplaced "coolness" over actual usefulness need to be sent to another planet, preferably one without air. And that includes 99.44% of so called "web developers" who only know how to do client side code.

Don't presume too much, they don't know how to do client side code.

Just take a look at any website today, people in the web dev business can't code for shit, they don't even get HTML and CSS right --

Don't generalize too much, makes you come across a bit of a dick. I for one am currently working on a ASP.net MVC project which uses both server side and client side (As you would expect) And everyone here seems adept at both. Working in web dev does not automatically make you a bad coder, its just easier for bad coders to get away with it.

Nagesh · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Ralph:
Gibbon1:
geoffrey:
Abbas:
I increasingly get the impression that (at least) 90% of the kids here have never actually worked on real systems (maybe they're the web devs mentioned earlier, who knows). Then I realise it's really a much higher percentage....

You are probably right. Many of these maverick web programmers think it's so easy to manage REAL enterprise development. They don't know what it's like in the real world where there is little room for petty ideals.

That's somewhat my impression. The comment about the programmer not understanding function parameters starts making me think the original code was written for a microprocessor with very little RAM and or no stack. In those situations you end up with code like that. And often the person writing it isn't really an experienced programmer. Yet, crappy as it is, the code probably worked, shipped and made money. Which for me is the true test.
Ridiculous! If we took you seriously, by that definition Microsoft would be a good software company.

Market is ultimate determinator of things. if market is continue to buy microsoft product, it makes it good.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Ralph:
Gibbon1:
Yet, crappy as it is, the code probably worked, shipped and made money. Which for me is the true test.
Ridiculous! If we took you seriously, by that definition Microsoft would be a 2/3 good software company. Their code ships and makes money.

FTFY

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
<snipped quotes>
Market is ultimate determinator of things. if market is continue to buy microsoft product, it makes it good.

That's a nice dream isn't it; but in practice, for software, free market often doesn't really work:

Once you have chosen a product built something on top of it, you depend so much on its particularities that the cost of switching to another vendor / product becomes prohibitive.
Once a product (especially OS) has enough momentum, most people use it because it's what everybody uses. Any alternative would have to offer tremendous advantages to make up for the lack of interoperability. This makes it extremely hard for newcomers to enter the market.
Most of the time your choice is severly limited by external constraints or simply by the lack of alternatives.

I'm sure I could re-phrase this same point in many other ways if I thought about it a little bit more...

Nagesh · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

just me:
Nagesh:
<snipped quotes>
Market is ultimate determinator of things. if market is continue to buy microsoft product, it makes it good.

That's a nice dream isn't it; but in practice, for software, free market often doesn't really work:

Once you have chosen a product built something on top of it, you depend so much on its particularities that the cost of switching to another vendor / product becomes prohibitive.

Once a product (especially OS) has enough momentum, most people use it because it's what everybody uses. Any alternative would have to offer tremendous advantages to make up for the lack of interoperability. This makes it extremely hard for newcomers to enter the market.

Most of the time your choice is severly limited by external constraints or simply by the lack of alternatives.

I'm sure I could re-phrase this same point in many other ways if I thought about it a little bit more...

Lack of alternative means you're first in market place. Early bird get worm. if you find hole and you fill need before anyone realise about hole in place, than it is natural for you to be first. Steve job find hole and decide to build iPOd. Apple became world-famous after that. Rest is history. Morita find hole and build walkman. rest is history. Bill Gates did this with Microsoft. There is no use crying over what could have been. If there is no alternative, nobody stop you from building it.

Toad is number 1 product for database development team, though they are always heard cursing it day in and day out. If there is better product someone will build it one day, but in meanwhile, they must use toad because it is better than sqlPlus.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

This differs from other industries how? You infer infrastructure, proprietary components and the status quo are not factors in nearly all other businesses from service to manufacturing to utilities etc.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Gibbon1:
geoffrey:
Abbas:
I increasingly get the impression that (at least) 90% of the kids here have never actually worked on real systems (maybe they're the web devs mentioned earlier, who knows). Then I realise it's really a much higher percentage....

You are probably right. Many of these maverick web programmers think it's so easy to manage REAL enterprise development. They don't know what it's like in the real world where there is little room for petty ideals.

That's somewhat my impression. The comment about the programmer not understanding function parameters starts making me think the original code was written for a microprocessor with very little RAM and or no stack. In those situations you end up with code like that.

Nice work! That's a beautiful rendition of the "that's how it's done on an embedded system" troll.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
Lack of alternative means you're first in market place. Early bird get worm. if you find hole and you fill need before anyone realise about hole in place, than it is natural for you to be first. Steve job find hole and decide to build iPOd. Apple became world-famous after that. Rest is history. Morita find hole and build walkman. rest is history. Bill Gates did this with Microsoft. There is no use crying over what could have been. If there is no alternative, nobody stop you from building it.

This is a joke, right? Was the hole MP3 player or MP3 player that doesn't suck? Also, you know people knew who apple was before that, right?

Nagesh:
Toad is number 1 product for database development team, though they are always heard cursing it day in and day out. If there is better product someone will build it one day, but in meanwhile, they must use toad because it is better than sqlPlus.

It'd almost have to be, wouldn't it?

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

just me:
Nagesh:
<snipped quotes>
Market is ultimate determinator of things. if market is continue to buy microsoft product, it makes it good.

That's a nice dream isn't it; but in practice, for software, free market often doesn't really work:

Once you have chosen a product built something on top of it, you depend so much on its particularities that the cost of switching to another vendor / product becomes prohibitive.

Once a product (especially OS) has enough momentum, most people use it because it's what everybody uses. Any alternative would have to offer tremendous advantages to make up for the lack of interoperability. This makes it extremely hard for newcomers to enter the market.

Most of the time your choice is severly limited by external constraints or simply by the lack of alternatives.

I'm sure I could re-phrase this same point in many other ways if I thought about it a little bit more...

That's why you choose hardware and software that implements standards instead of garbage that is designed to trap you as its highest priority.

Kinda like the web. Everything can interoperate with everything (to the extent that they properly follow the standards). The standard format for a document should never be "use Word" but rather "conform to this document layout standard, whatever platform you use to create it". Then, you can talk to everybody, instead of just other dupes who got conned into using the same product.

Nagesh · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Tim:
just me:
Nagesh:
<snipped quotes>
Market is ultimate determinator of things. if market is continue to buy microsoft product, it makes it good.

That's a nice dream isn't it; but in practice, for software, free market often doesn't really work:

Once you have chosen a product built something on top of it, you depend so much on its particularities that the cost of switching to another vendor / product becomes prohibitive.

Once a product (especially OS) has enough momentum, most people use it because it's what everybody uses. Any alternative would have to offer tremendous advantages to make up for the lack of interoperability. This makes it extremely hard for newcomers to enter the market.

Most of the time your choice is severly limited by external constraints or simply by the lack of alternatives.

I'm sure I could re-phrase this same point in many other ways if I thought about it a little bit more...
That's why you choose hardware and software that implements standards instead of garbage that is designed to trap you as its highest priority.

Kinda like the web. Everything can interoperate with everything (to the extent that they properly follow the standards). The standard format for a document should never be "use Word" but rather "conform to this document layout standard, whatever platform you use to create it". Then, you can talk to everybody, instead of just other dupes who got conned into using the same product.

Dear Tim, Use of Microsoft word is most convenient then anything else. So I don't see reason not to use word.

Love, CEO of Severe Companies Of This World.

Nagesh · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Franz Kafka:
Nagesh:
Lack of alternative means you're first in market place. Early bird get worm. if you find hole and you fill need before anyone realise about hole in place, than it is natural for you to be first. Steve job find hole and decide to build iPOd. Apple became world-famous after that. Rest is history. Morita find hole and build walkman. rest is history. Bill Gates did this with Microsoft. There is no use crying over what could have been. If there is no alternative, nobody stop you from building it.

This is a joke, right? Was the hole MP3 player or MP3 player that doesn't suck? Also, you know people knew who apple was before that, right?

Nagesh:
Toad is number 1 product for database development team, though they are always heard cursing it day in and day out. If there is better product someone will build it one day, but in meanwhile, they must use toad because it is better than sqlPlus.

It'd almost have to be, wouldn't it?

Yes, people knew apple, but not all around world. Due to iPod and later iPhone and even later iPad, people all around world know Apple and Steve Jobs legacy.

You are missing point of my argument and getting into non-necesary debate about Toad being better than Sql Plus.

Argle · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

The "happy ending" to this was that the company who wanted the changes found out there was a clause in his contract requiring him to make the specific changes gratis. Hopefully for him he liked to modify his own code.

Argle · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

heh! That reminds me of the day I discovered that _ was a legitimate C variable name and I just had to write a demo program with _, __, etc.

no laughing matter · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Meep:
Gibbon1:
That's somewhat my impression. The comment about the programmer not understanding function parameters starts making me think the original code was written for a microprocessor with very little RAM and or no stack. In those situations you end up with code like that.

Nice work! That's a beautiful rendition of the "that's how it's done on an embedded system" troll.

It's OKish. For a "beautiful rendition" i find the part about the non-existing file systems kind of lacking!

Learn you're meme folks, the details matter(horn)!

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

BillClintonsThirdTerm:
Uncle Remus:
Uppity is a racist term, I'm not saying its usage is racist here, but it is a racist term. Its etymology is traced directly back to slave states in the U.S. as a term for a Black person who dosen't know their place.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/11/yep-uppity-racist/45321/.

Nigga Please

Really... LOL!!!

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Tim:
just me:
Nagesh:
<snipped quotes>
Market is ultimate determinator of things. if market is continue to buy microsoft product, it makes it good.

That's a nice dream isn't it; but in practice, for software, free market often doesn't really work:

Once you have chosen a product built something on top of it, you depend so much on its particularities that the cost of switching to another vendor / product becomes prohibitive.

Once a product (especially OS) has enough momentum, most people use it because it's what everybody uses. Any alternative would have to offer tremendous advantages to make up for the lack of interoperability. This makes it extremely hard for newcomers to enter the market.

Most of the time your choice is severly limited by external constraints or simply by the lack of alternatives.

I'm sure I could re-phrase this same point in many other ways if I thought about it a little bit more...
That's why you choose hardware and software that implements standards instead of garbage that is designed to trap you as its highest priority.

Kinda like the web. Everything can interoperate with everything (to the extent that they properly follow the standards). The standard format for a document should never be "use Word" but rather "conform to this document layout standard, whatever platform you use to create it". Then, you can talk to everybody, instead of just other dupes who got conned into using the same product.

Imagine telling "conform to this document layout standard, whatever platform you use to create it" to someone with whom you are doing business that is a complete novice user, without mention of any specific products. Let me know how long it takes you before you get frustrated and say "just send it to me in Word."

People who are late to the party always want the front runners to slow down for them. Sorry, I don't feel the need to dumb down my Office documents so they work with OpenOffice.

trtrwtf · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

bjolling:
Gunslinger:
qwerty:
I call BS. Nobody would name their kid Aargle.

They didn't. The doctor misspelled Argyle.

Maybe he was dictating it.

Maybe he died while dictating it.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

geoffrey:
Imagine telling "conform to this document layout standard, whatever platform you use to create it" to someone with whom you are doing business that is a complete novice user, without mention of any specific products. Let me know how long it takes you before you get frustrated and say "just send it to me in Word."
People who are late to the party always want the front runners to slow down for them. Sorry, I don't feel the need to dumb down my Office documents so they work with OpenOffice.

Imagine telling "use a web browser" to someone with whom you are doing business that is a complete novice user, without mention of any specific products. Let me know how long it takes you before you get frustrated and say "just send it to me in some program and I'll go buy a copy of whatever it is you picked".

Coyne · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Lefty:
Steve The Cynic:
These "modestly complex" functions are, compared to some code I've had the misfortune to work with, models of simplicity. 10 to 40 lines? Mere nothings. I've seen functions with 2500 lines, in 1.6MB source files...

My personal favorite was an 8,000+ line switch statement in a project I used to work on.

Since we're talking about favorites, mine was the 37 nested levels of IF statements in the 2000+ line paragraph.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

White Fang:
A better language would allow bolding, italics and subtly different fonts to obfuscate the code.
Personally, I have failed to grok in fullness the manifest benefits provided by case sensitive languages.

I like case insensitivity myself, but computer languages don't use it mostly because case sensitivity in international environments is hard. Consider that in Turkish upper('i') != 'I' and in German lower('SS') != 'ss'. Case sensitivity is a no-brainer to implement. For a significant percentage of people, e.g. a lot of locales in Asia, case does not exist in their written languages. For the rest, case sensitivity is an easy concept to comprehend.

I once considered adding a "coding locale" feature so that a developer can specify which locale the code was written in and have those rules applied as required - case sensitivity, date, time, number, currency formats, etc. This can be a different locale than the code actually uses in the UI, etc.

However, this runs into problems very quickly. For example, what about included files, does the locale inherit, cascade, reset, etc? You can have global variables accessed by different modules, each interpreting to its own locale rules. At this point, one is defining locale rules for every string variable, individual methods, files, etc., and it becomes a nightmare.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

foo:
UncleAldo:
RN:
Does God exist anymore when no-one remembers him?

If there are no more references to it, it should be garbage collected, I think.
That would explain why God is so obsessed with people thinking about and worshipping him. (At least according to organized religion.)

You shall not allocate reference counts to other gods.
You shall not instantiate aliases against which others may allocate reference counts, whether by accident or intent. All such aliases will be destroyed without hesitation, all links followed until nullity achieved.
You shall not increment your reference count unnecessarily to artificially increase your status.
Allow garbage collection to proceed as scheduled.

... the rest

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Buddy:
case sensitivity in international environments is hard. Consider that in Turkish upper('i') != 'I' and in German lower('SS') != 'ss'.

This is why we never should have allowed all those other countries onto our World Wide Web!

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

StJohn:
Aargle Zymurgy. Sounds like an anagram.

I reckon someones had a list of names - a phone book, perhaps and they've taken the very first name as the first name, and the very last name as the last name....

Hmm....

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

geoffrey:
Ralph:
Gibbon1:
geoffrey:
Abbas:
I increasingly get the impression that (at least) 90% of the kids here have never actually worked on real systems (maybe they're the web devs mentioned earlier, who knows). Then I realise it's really a much higher percentage....

You are probably right. Many of these maverick web programmers think it's so easy to manage REAL enterprise development. They don't know what it's like in the real world where there is little room for petty ideals.

That's somewhat my impression. The comment about the programmer not understanding function parameters starts making me think the original code was written for a microprocessor with very little RAM and or no stack. In those situations you end up with code like that. And often the person writing it isn't really an experienced programmer. Yet, crappy as it is, the code probably worked, shipped and made money. Which for me is the true test.
Ridiculous! If we took you seriously, by that definition Microsoft would be a good software company.

I guess it depends on what your definition of "good" is. If it means "makes useful software for billions of people worldwide," then I'd say they're one of the best. If your definition is some obscure set of conditions about which only a few care, then maybe they're not.

I'm not even sure if geoffery is trolling anymore....

People bag MS because there's always some small corner case that they want something for that isn;t quite covered by MS software. Their principle is closer to "make everyone happy some of the time" (and yes, all of you who say "I've never been happy with even an iota of any one of their products", I ask you "Why do you use them?")

Do they write good code? We don't know - how many of us have actually seen the source (other than little snippets which could be controlled doses of misinformation).
Does their software work? Remarkably well, considering the (seemingly infinite, I dare say) variety in configuration that exists in computers that run it. Are they making big bucks? Undoubtedly. Do most of the people who bag them wish they had a job there? I suspect so.

So we have a company making (significant) money on a range of Software Products that are flexible enough to run on a host of Hardware/OS configurations. People actually want to work for them, and (despite recent trends) they still hold majority market share in many of the areas they produce software in.

Does Windows annoy me? Not constantly.
Does the Office suite annoy me? I use Word, Excel, PowerPoint almost daily. Some of the features (autoformat) get annoying at times, and sometimes it's cumbersome to do things I want and get documents looking how I like - but perhaps what I want is unreasonable.

Why (other than their recruitment questions, which have been discussed here thoroughly) do people keep insisting that MS is crap? They provide reasonable products for their target audience. I don't understand why anyone would even touch Access with a 10 ft barge pole, but there's obviously a market for it....

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Wehey:
L.:
Ralph:
Programmers who indulge their compulsions of misplaced "coolness" over actual usefulness need to be sent to another planet, preferably one without air. And that includes 99.44% of so called "web developers" who only know how to do client side code.

Don't presume too much, they don't know how to do client side code.

Just take a look at any website today, people in the web dev business can't code for shit, they don't even get HTML and CSS right --

Don't generalize too much, makes you come across a bit of a dick. I for one am currently working on a ASP.net MVC project which uses both server side and client side (As you would expect) And everyone here seems adept at both. Working in web dev does not automatically make you a bad coder, its just easier for bad coders to get away with it.

This ^1000

Everyone wants a website. It is easy to make pretty pictures on a webpage and appear competent to someone who doesn't know anything about the mystical world of computers. Ergo many shops make the mistake of hiring cheap web developers because of the pretty unicorns (sorry Remy). In the old days, people who used Computer Systems were often semi-technical, and the computer would be used to aid or replace some laborious task. Today people seem to think it's practically illegal not to have a website - so they use google to find "cheap website". This can only ever end in tears, because Joe Peanut who once created and eBay account for his Grandma and has since personalised his facebook page now believes he is an expert in programming, and advertises his web development expertise.

That said, I still think Web Devs are pretend programmers....

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

the big dog is always the target.

Like Oracle's usurpation of java will result any any improvements to the language?

that's Rhetorical.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
just me:
Nagesh:
<snipped quotes>
Market is ultimate determinator of things. if market is continue to buy microsoft product, it makes it good.

That's a nice dream isn't it; but in practice, for software, free market often doesn't really work:

Once you have chosen a product built something on top of it, you depend so much on its particularities that the cost of switching to another vendor / product becomes prohibitive.

Once a product (especially OS) has enough momentum, most people use it because it's what everybody uses. Any alternative would have to offer tremendous advantages to make up for the lack of interoperability. This makes it extremely hard for newcomers to enter the market.

Most of the time your choice is severly limited by external constraints or simply by the lack of alternatives.

I'm sure I could re-phrase this same point in many other ways if I thought about it a little bit more...

Lack of alternative means you're first in market place. Early bird get worm. if you find hole and you fill need before anyone realise about hole in place, than it is natural for you to be first. Steve job find hole and decide to build iPOd. Apple became world-famous after that. Rest is history. Morita find hole and build walkman. rest is history. Bill Gates did this with Microsoft. There is no use crying over what could have been. If there is no alternative, nobody stop you from building it.

Toad is number 1 product for database development team, though they are always heard cursing it day in and day out. If there is better product someone will build it one day, but in meanwhile, they must use toad because it is better than sqlPlus.

Spot on - you can't be the real Nagesh...

There's two types of people in the world, those who complain that it's not fair, and those that go out and do something about it.

Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg and outside IT Branson etc weren't just "lucky" - they created products people wanted. It's easy to make the points about Gates exploiting a prohibitive market, but if someone made something demonstratively better it would gradually become the norm. Gates has created the situation himself, and if he is now exploiting it then it shows good business nous not flaws in a free market.

How about all of us code monkeys who are collectively better than M$'s code Monkeys get together and make a better product. Oh wait, the Open Source community is already doing that. Let's see how it goes....

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Since you're making a decent effort to keep the trolling alive, and I'm bored...

Mike:
People bag MS because there's always some small corner case that they want something for that isn;t quite covered by MS software.

Or maybe they bag MS because they think most of what they sell is polished turds.

Mike:
all of you who say "I've never been happy with even an iota of any one of their products", I ask you "Why do you use them?"

I pretty much don't, except when forced by an employer. And yes, depth of MS lock-in is one of the factors I consider when choosing an employer.

Mike:
Do they write good code? We don't know

I do. Good code follows design principles worked out by computer scientists over the decades, and therefore doesn't crap all over itself nearly as often.

Mike:
Does their software work? Remarkably well

Or perhaps, just barely enough to stay ahead of the expectations of the ignorant masses.

Mike:
considering the (seemingly infinite, I dare say) variety in configuration that exists in computers that run it.

Sounds like you might be one of those programmers who thinks "we have to test this on the fifty most popular platforms" instead of "I'll comply to standards and then it will work on everything else that complies with standards." Instead, as mentioned earlier, some vendors do their best to lock you in instead of allowing standards.

Mike:
Are they making big bucks? Undoubtedly.

If that's relevant, than I guess the biggest Mafia boss is the best person in your neighborhood.

Mike:
Do most of the people who bag them wish they had a job there? I suspect so.

I just threw up in my mouth and not just a little bit.

Mike:
Does Windows annoy me? Not constantly.

Well there's a lofty target we can all strive to reach.

I curse Bill Gates and Co. on the average of several times a day for the dumb things they've done to save an hour that still cost extra work for their victims years later. Like ending every line with two characters (return, newline) instead of one.

Mike:
Why... do people keep insisting that MS is crap?

Hmmm, no reason at all, I guess. Merely the random coincidence of a million voices screaming and then being snuffed out.

Matt Westwood · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Mike:
geoffrey:
Ralph:
Gibbon1:
geoffrey:
Abbas:
I increasingly get the impression that (at least) 90% of the kids here have never actually worked on real systems (maybe they're the web devs mentioned earlier, who knows). Then I realise it's really a much higher percentage....

You are probably right. Many of these maverick web programmers think it's so easy to manage REAL enterprise development. They don't know what it's like in the real world where there is little room for petty ideals.

That's somewhat my impression. The comment about the programmer not understanding function parameters starts making me think the original code was written for a microprocessor with very little RAM and or no stack. In those situations you end up with code like that. And often the person writing it isn't really an experienced programmer. Yet, crappy as it is, the code probably worked, shipped and made money. Which for me is the true test.
Ridiculous! If we took you seriously, by that definition Microsoft would be a good software company.

I guess it depends on what your definition of "good" is. If it means "makes useful software for billions of people worldwide," then I'd say they're one of the best. If your definition is some obscure set of conditions about which only a few care, then maybe they're not.
I'm not even sure if geoffery is trolling anymore....

People bag MS because there's always some small corner case that they want something for that isn;t quite covered by MS software. Their principle is closer to "make everyone happy some of the time" (and yes, all of you who say "I've never been happy with even an iota of any one of their products", I ask you "Why do you use them?")

Do they write good code? We don't know - how many of us have actually seen the source (other than little snippets which could be controlled doses of misinformation).
Does their software work? Remarkably well, considering the (seemingly infinite, I dare say) variety in configuration that exists in computers that run it. Are they making big bucks? Undoubtedly. Do most of the people who bag them wish they had a job there? I suspect so.

So we have a company making (significant) money on a range of Software Products that are flexible enough to run on a host of Hardware/OS configurations. People actually want to work for them, and (despite recent trends) they still hold majority market share in many of the areas they produce software in.

Does Windows annoy me? Not constantly.
Does the Office suite annoy me? I use Word, Excel, PowerPoint almost daily. Some of the features (autoformat) get annoying at times, and sometimes it's cumbersome to do things I want and get documents looking how I like - but perhaps what I want is unreasonable.

Why (other than their recruitment questions, which have been discussed here thoroughly) do people keep insisting that MS is crap? They provide reasonable products for their target audience. I don't understand why anyone would even touch Access with a 10 ft barge pole, but there's obviously a market for it....

After today's fuckup where we came pretty fucking close to missing a deadline because of everybody's laptop simultaneously installing a whole farceload of Windows 7 updates without even asking our permission first? Bunch of cunts.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Coyne:
Lefty:
Steve The Cynic:
These "modestly complex" functions are, compared to some code I've had the misfortune to work with, models of simplicity. 10 to 40 lines? Mere nothings. I've seen functions with 2500 lines, in 1.6MB source files...

My personal favorite was an 8,000+ line switch statement in a project I used to work on.

Since we're talking about favorites, mine was the 37 nested levels of IF statements in the 2000+ line paragraph.

Mine was the 3000+ methods created (each with at most 3 lines in them) to avoid having a long method. It really simplifies the code, and having the actual functionality nested in 10 layers of what is essentially wrapper code was really efficient.

Okay, I joke a little, but I hate arbitrary rules about how complex code is allowed to be (10 branch points per method seems common). Yes we should keep things simple, but this doesn't necessarily mean creating cascading methods which hide functioanlity rather than simplify support.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Ralph:
Since you're making a decent effort to keep the trolling alive, and I'm bored...

Not sure if I'm flattered or offended...

Ralph:
Mike:
People bag MS because there's always some small corner case that they want something for that isn;t quite covered by MS software.
Or maybe they bag MS because they think most of what they sell is polished turds.

And yet they insist on using their products. Perhaps polished turds are a lot more valuable than you think

Ralph:
Mike:
all of you who say "I've never been happy with even an iota of any one of their products", I ask you "Why do you use them?"
I pretty much don't, except when forced by an employer. And yes, depth of MS lock-in is one of the factors I consider when choosing an employer.

Fair enough. If everyone was voting with their feet like you, MS would be losing Market share quicker than it is.

Ralph:
Mike:
Do they write good code? We don't know
I do. Good code follows design principles worked out by computer scientists over the decades, and therefore doesn't crap all over itself nearly as often.

I'm not sure what you mean about MS code crapping on itself. If you mean that errors occur when different MS components interact then I have to ask do you believe that the same development teams write all MS code? They have a vast number of independent products. I'm not sure that there's too much evidence of "Good Design Principles" not being followed - do all Open Source projects interact with each other seamlessly? At the end of the day the independence of Open Source projects is roughly how I would imagine projects within MS - different teams (including managers, designers, coders etc)

Ralph:
Mike:
Does their software work? Remarkably well
Or perhaps, just barely enough to stay ahead of the expectations of the ignorant masses.

Well enough for the target audience to be staying on board, I notice.

Ralph:
Mike:
considering the (seemingly infinite, I dare say) variety in configuration that exists in computers that run it.
Sounds like you might be one of those programmers who thinks "we have to test this on the fifty most popular platforms" instead of "I'll comply to standards and then it will work on everything else that complies with standards." Instead, as mentioned earlier, some vendors do their best to lock you in instead of allowing standards.

Indeed, locking you in is their prerogative. But how many of the standards you talk about exist because people saw how MS collared the market? XML dates from 1996, SGML only 10 years before that. Such standards were somewhere between unheard of and unproven at the time MS was making it's Office Suite.

Ralph:
Mike:
Are they making big bucks? Undoubtedly.
If that's relevant, than I guess the biggest Mafia boss is the best person in your neighborhood.

No, but the Mafia may well be the best run organisation in my area. Write a crap product (I'm sure you can), and show me how you make money from it.

Ralph:
Mike:
Do most of the people who bag them wish they had a job there? I suspect so.
I just threw up in my mouth and not just a little bit.

Sorry to make you sick, but I think many of the people who bag MS have aspirations of working there one day.

Ralph:
Mike:
Does Windows annoy me? Not constantly.
Well there's a lofty target we can all strive to reach.
I curse Bill Gates and Co. on the average of several times a day for the dumb things they've done to save an hour that still cost extra work for their victims years later. Like ending every line with two characters (return, newline) instead of one.

One bad decision, admittedly reasonable impact (especially if we're working between Windows and another OS), but it's a lot of headache from 1 mistake, it isn't a pattern of repeated screw ups. Shoudl they fix it, or is that going to create potential compatibility issues? (Did they used to sell disk space - I imagine there's a lot of "returns" stored on disk)

Ralph:
Mike:
Why... do people keep insisting that MS is crap?
Hmmm, no reason at all, I guess. Merely the random coincidence of a million voices screaming and then being snuffed out.

But that's the point isn't it - they get snuffed out. Why? Because the voice is an insignificant minority. The general population simply doesn't care enough. Maybe, if there is such room to make far more robust programs and gain the market share you could go out and do it?

Perhaps it's just a lot of apathy, or more likely the world is not actually as unimpressed by MS as some people like to believe

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Mike:
geoffrey:
Ralph:
Gibbon1:
geoffrey:
Abbas:
I increasingly get the impression that (at least) 90% of the kids here have never actually worked on real systems (maybe they're the web devs mentioned earlier, who knows). Then I realise it's really a much higher percentage....

You are probably right. Many of these maverick web programmers think it's so easy to manage REAL enterprise development. They don't know what it's like in the real world where there is little room for petty ideals.

That's somewhat my impression. The comment about the programmer not understanding function parameters starts making me think the original code was written for a microprocessor with very little RAM and or no stack. In those situations you end up with code like that. And often the person writing it isn't really an experienced programmer. Yet, crappy as it is, the code probably worked, shipped and made money. Which for me is the true test.
Ridiculous! If we took you seriously, by that definition Microsoft would be a good software company.

I guess it depends on what your definition of "good" is. If it means "makes useful software for billions of people worldwide," then I'd say they're one of the best. If your definition is some obscure set of conditions about which only a few care, then maybe they're not.
I'm not even sure if geoffery is trolling anymore....

People bag MS because there's always some small corner case that they want something for that isn;t quite covered by MS software. Their principle is closer to "make everyone happy some of the time" (and yes, all of you who say "I've never been happy with even an iota of any one of their products", I ask you "Why do you use them?")

Do they write good code? We don't know - how many of us have actually seen the source (other than little snippets which could be controlled doses of misinformation).
Does their software work? Remarkably well, considering the (seemingly infinite, I dare say) variety in configuration that exists in computers that run it. Are they making big bucks? Undoubtedly. Do most of the people who bag them wish they had a job there? I suspect so.

So we have a company making (significant) money on a range of Software Products that are flexible enough to run on a host of Hardware/OS configurations. People actually want to work for them, and (despite recent trends) they still hold majority market share in many of the areas they produce software in.

Does Windows annoy me? Not constantly.
Does the Office suite annoy me? I use Word, Excel, PowerPoint almost daily. Some of the features (autoformat) get annoying at times, and sometimes it's cumbersome to do things I want and get documents looking how I like - but perhaps what I want is unreasonable.

Why (other than their recruitment questions, which have been discussed here thoroughly) do people keep insisting that MS is crap? They provide reasonable products for their target audience. I don't understand why anyone would even touch Access with a 10 ft barge pole, but there's obviously a market for it....

After today's fuckup where we came pretty fucking close to missing a deadline because of everybody's laptop simultaneously installing a whole farceload of Windows 7 updates without even asking our permission first? Bunch of cunts.

That is unfortunate, but I wonder whether it's prudent to suggest that your Systems Admins (or whoever keeps your systems running) might be more at fault than MS in that instance. I'm pretty sure "automatic updates" are not compulsory and can be switched off...

Should note that MS aren't the only people who do automatic updates.

Of course, we could go back to the good old school systems where things don't automatically improve themselves (which would be a good thing IMO).

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Diary of a forlorn intelligence, says this code makes one bar no mind from the spluttering faded vox populus.

With that said, I would try down first. The variations are easier.

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Mike:
Matt Westwood:
Mike:
geoffrey:
Ralph:
Gibbon1:
geoffrey:
Abbas:
I increasingly get the impression that (at least) 90% of the kids here have never actually worked on real systems (maybe they're the web devs mentioned earlier, who knows). Then I realise it's really a much higher percentage....

You are probably right. Many of these maverick web programmers think it's so easy to manage REAL enterprise development. They don't know what it's like in the real world where there is little room for petty ideals.

That's somewhat my impression. The comment about the programmer not understanding function parameters starts making me think the original code was written for a microprocessor with very little RAM and or no stack. In those situations you end up with code like that. And often the person writing it isn't really an experienced programmer. Yet, crappy as it is, the code probably worked, shipped and made money. Which for me is the true test.
Ridiculous! If we took you seriously, by that definition Microsoft would be a good software company.

I guess it depends on what your definition of "good" is. If it means "makes useful software for billions of people worldwide," then I'd say they're one of the best. If your definition is some obscure set of conditions about which only a few care, then maybe they're not.
I'm not even sure if geoffery is trolling anymore....

People bag MS because there's always some small corner case that they want something for that isn;t quite covered by MS software. Their principle is closer to "make everyone happy some of the time" (and yes, all of you who say "I've never been happy with even an iota of any one of their products", I ask you "Why do you use them?")

Do they write good code? We don't know - how many of us have actually seen the source (other than little snippets which could be controlled doses of misinformation).
Does their software work? Remarkably well, considering the (seemingly infinite, I dare say) variety in configuration that exists in computers that run it. Are they making big bucks? Undoubtedly. Do most of the people who bag them wish they had a job there? I suspect so.

So we have a company making (significant) money on a range of Software Products that are flexible enough to run on a host of Hardware/OS configurations. People actually want to work for them, and (despite recent trends) they still hold majority market share in many of the areas they produce software in.

Does Windows annoy me? Not constantly.
Does the Office suite annoy me? I use Word, Excel, PowerPoint almost daily. Some of the features (autoformat) get annoying at times, and sometimes it's cumbersome to do things I want and get documents looking how I like - but perhaps what I want is unreasonable.

Why (other than their recruitment questions, which have been discussed here thoroughly) do people keep insisting that MS is crap? They provide reasonable products for their target audience. I don't understand why anyone would even touch Access with a 10 ft barge pole, but there's obviously a market for it....

After today's fuckup where we came pretty fucking close to missing a deadline because of everybody's laptop simultaneously installing a whole farceload of Windows 7 updates without even asking our permission first? Bunch of cunts.
That is unfortunate, but I wonder whether it's prudent to suggest that your Systems Admins (or whoever keeps your systems running) might be more at fault than MS in that instance. I'm pretty sure "automatic updates" are not compulsory and can be switched off...

Should note that MS aren't the only people who do automatic updates.

Of course, we could go back to the good old school systems where things don't automatically improve themselves (which would be a good thing IMO).

Thanks, I agree

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

I see that the bunch of righteous cunts have jumped on the "I hate M$" bandwagon.

Argle · 2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Jim:
StJohn:
Aargle Zymurgy. Sounds like an anagram.
I reckon someones had a list of names - a phone book, perhaps and they've taken the very first name as the first name, and the very last name as the last name....
Hmm....

Very astute. It was something like that. :-)

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

geoffrey:
The submitter fails to mention whether or not the code in question worked. If it does/did, then it should not matter how it implemented..

One of the characteristics of obfuscated code is that is very difficult to verify that it works. (NB "works" is here defined as "always does what it is supposed to do", not "I ran it a few times and didn't immediately notice anything wrong")

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Argle:
Jim:
StJohn:
Aargle Zymurgy. Sounds like an anagram.
I reckon someones had a list of names - a phone book, perhaps and they've taken the very first name as the first name, and the very last name as the last name....
Hmm....
Very astute. It was something like that. :-)

It actually reminds me of the COBOL program I wrote to create Birth Certificates for Cabbage Patch Kids, "way back when". . .

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Up, up, Down, down, Left, Right, left, right, B, A, Start

2011-12-13 Reply Admin

Jeremy:
geoffrey:
The submitter fails to mention whether or not the code in question worked. If it does/did, then it should not matter how it implemented..

One of the characteristics of obfuscated code is that is very difficult to verify that it works. (NB "works" is here defined as "always does what it is supposed to do", not "I ran it a few times and didn't immediately notice anything wrong")

Mate, it compiled with no errors and only a few harmless warnings - at least the warnings looked harmless. This is production ready. Testing is just for Wusses who don't trust their code.

Matt Westwood · 2011-12-14 Reply Admin

Nag-Geoff:
I see that the bunch of righteous cunts have jumped on the "I hate M$" bandwagon.

We certainly have. Microsoft products get worse with every upgrade. Office 2010 is outrageously bad.

Uppity

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