• Foo (unregistered)

    Foo or foo not, there is no try.

  • Puzzl´d (unregistered)

    To foo or not to foo, that is the code

  • Quite (unregistered) in reply to Foo

    Damn it, that was the joke I was going to make.

  • (nodebb)

    snoofle, why did you put "so-called" before "professionals"?

    I always believed that "professional" actually implied "business".

    Btw, isn't that snippet of code the standard way of handling Boolean values of FILE_NOT_FOUND?

  • (nodebb) in reply to Foo

    If there is no try, there is no catch, either.

  • Reader (unregistered)

    'professional' does not say anything about skills - only about self confidence

  • cst1992 (unregistered)

    @Reader Those who are experts are not always professionals, and those who are professionals are not always experts.

  • DNA (unregistered)

    Or just someone payed (or getting bonuses) by the line. Or someone who doesn't want to do real work while giving the impression to have done something.

  • IP_Guru (unregistered)

    Professional simply means "Paid to do it"

  • Crash Magnet (unregistered)

    "Being a professional means going in and doing a good job, even when you don't feel like it." - Sammy Davis Jr.

  • b.a. freeman (unregistered)

    DH is lucky he found out as an intern; i had to learn after i got into the real world.

  • Toby Johnson (google)

    "When you get your first pay check at your first real job and discover that the government gets the first bite, you get a little disenchanted as you grow up."

    First bite? More like they shove their grubby hands into your bag, eat half your burger, shove a handful of fries into their mouth, slurp down your soda with plenty of backwash, then hand it back to you and say "here, I'm finished."

  • MyName (unregistered) in reply to Toby Johnson

    Sure, but it feels a lot less bad when the government says in the end "Here, I'm finished. Oh, and here's your mom's $1500 a shot cancer medicine, it's on me."

    Of course I may live in the only country in the world where that happens. If so, yay me!

  • (nodebb) in reply to MyName

    "Oh, and by the way, have some free roads, police, fire protection, schooling, and garbage collection."

  • Hans the Great (unregistered) in reply to IP_Guru

    Exactly. You have a profession. You might be good at it or not so good but you get paid for doing it. You might even have an education for it. Still does not mean you are good at it or even competent. Someone even get a certificates. Still does not mean you are competent!

  • Jeremy Lindgren (vita10gy) (google)

    Where I used to work we'd always have to argue about what combination of columns would make a row unique to a table because the powers that be hated the idea of "just making up a number that doesn't mean anything". There was no convincing them that having 5 columns from table A acting as the foreign key in table B is terrible, or that they work with these "made up numbers" all the time, they're just used to those. (Order numbers, for example).

  • Jérôme Grimbert (google)

    If foo is a real type (such as double or float), IIRC, NaN is an interesting value when coming to evaluate foo || !foo

  • kktkkr (unregistered)

    Just in case you want your program to crash on some alien boolean FileNotFound type but are worried that it might evaluate foo||!foo to false and skip all the "important" code instead.

  • Bob (unregistered)

    I'm a guy who's attracted to gals, so I'm in the majority in this industry...but I can still recognize that:

    "When you realize that the prettiest members of the opposite sex aren't always as nice and sweet as you might fantasize, you face a reality of life and grow up."

    does not reflect the diversity of my co-workers and can be off-putting in a way that was likely not intended.

  • Jerepp (unregistered)

    You know I can see why he was disillusioned, the code is obviously insufficient:

    try if (foo||!foo) { // code else { // same code } catch { //third verse same as the first }

  • Pauller (unregistered)

    This didn't make me go WTF - this made me throw up in my mouth a little

  • Carl Witthoft (google)

    Get even with the person who demanded those four radio buttons. Link all of them to a random number generator.

  • Brian Boorman (google) in reply to Toby Johnson

    And that's just the start. After you pay your fed & state income tax, medicare, disability, and social security taxes, then when you spend your already-taxed dollars you get to pay gasoline taxes at the pump, sales taxes at the stores and property taxes on your home.

    And then maybe you have some left to buy food and electricity.

    Pre-emptive snarky comment: 1st World Problems.

  • Tom (unregistered) in reply to Bob

    It's impossible to write anything of substance without offending some group. Actually, it's hard enough to successfully target your writing to even half of a general audience.

  • Carl Witthoft (google) in reply to Tom

    I'm offended by your use of the word "impossible." signed, God

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Brian Boorman

    At least everywhere EXCEPT the United States, you get something for the money you put in.

    Here, we're so afraid of "government control" that we pay as much as everyone else, but get no healthcare, etc.

  • Civics Lessons (unregistered)

    "When you get your first pay check at your first real job and discover that the government gets the first bite, you get a little disenchanted as you grow up." I see this trope a lot in US TV and movies, and I have to ask; do US schools not teach about the concept of taxes? How do people become old enough to have a job but not know that some of their income is going to be taxed?

  • thosrtanner (unregistered)

    so-called "professional"? Oh gods, every time I see code from someone who claims they are "professional" I see stuff that makes the quoted example look clean and wonderful. Can you imagine something that would qualify as bad fortran, but written in C++.

    But apparently it is professional to write unmaintainable code that breaks horribly but utterly silently if the undocumented assumptions it makes aren't met.

  • Ex-lurker (unregistered) in reply to Brian Boorman

    You're wrong. About the snarky comment, I mean.

    I live in a third-world country and taxes are an even worse problem here. In fact, that is more of a problem to poorer countries because: a) lower-income people are more severely affected by taxes, even if they pay less; and b) the poorer the country, the higher is its corruption. Which leads to money not always being enough, which leads to the brillant idea from government to raise taxes instead of fighting corruption. That's not to say the 1st world doesn't have to deal with corruption, it's just at a lower level. This is a subject my country's politicians know like no other. Thankfully I'm seeing things starting to change due to social unrest.

  • Ex-lurker (unregistered) in reply to Ex-lurker

    I could swear I had a few line feeds placed here and there. Oh well...

  • Herby (unregistered)

    Yes, management can get its hands into EVERYTHING. In my case, I thought that a good idea for the version output was to make it a date associated with the last edit, in nice simple terms. So if today were the last edit, the version would be "Jun_15_2016". Of course this made all sorts of sense. No, the manager wanted a NUMBER no matter how obscure, so I decided to make up a proper number. Plug the date into the routine that gives you seconds from the epoch, advance to NOON (GMT), and lop off 4 digits. This would give a number that when 4 zeros were added back would give a proper date. So the version NUMBER became 146599, which will work nicely for input to the date command after you add the proper number of zeros back in, even with the display being in the pacific time zone in most cases.

    Problem "solved"!!

  • Marnee (unregistered) in reply to jkshapiro

    Nothing is free!

  • Just Me (unregistered) in reply to Marnee

    The trick is to get someone else to pay for it.

  • Remy Porter (google) in reply to Bob

    It's funny that you bring that up, because I did almost break out the editorial hat and modify that line, but I decided to let it pass.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Herby

    [YY]YYMMDD not a good enough number for you?

  • Donald T. (unregistered)

    When you realize that the prettiest members of the opposite sex aren't always as nice and sweet as you might fantasize, you face a reality of life and grow up.

    Plug the date into the routine that gives you seconds from the epoch, advance to NOON (GMT), and lop off 4 digits. This would give a number that when 4 zeros were added back would give a proper date.

    Now I'm confused. Was that a pretty one or a sweet one?

  • The precedent (unregistered)

    "if (foo || !foo) { /Code/ } else { /same code as above/ }"

    Someone wanted the same result for #define foo 3,14159 as for #define foo 3.14159

  • John S (unregistered) in reply to Jérôme Grimbert

    The WTF would be passing a floating point number to a boolean expression. Passing integers is bad enough.

    Loss of innocence is when you realize that the people behind PHP thought that the string variable "0.00" is empty.

    if (empty("")) { true; } if (empty(0.0)) { true; } if (empty("0.0")) { ... also true; // WTF! }

  • Mikey Dread (unregistered) in reply to Bob

    I must admit I thought exactly the same when I read that. Self fulfilling audience assumptions?

  • Steve (unregistered)

    class FooClass { operator bool const { return ((double) rand() / RAND_MAX > 0.5) }; bool operator! () const { return ((double) rand() / RAND_MAX > 0.5) }; }

    FooClass foo;

    if (foo || !foo) // that is the question

  • (nodebb) in reply to Steve

    If you ever deploy FooClass in production code, I'll be there, digging your endocrine glands out with a rusty screwdriver.

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to Bob

    can be off-putting in a way that was likely not intended

    As you seem to have recognized it was likely not intended. Going out of one's way to be offended is not something others should avoid. Professional offendees are off-putting in a way that is certainly intended.

  • Lurch (unregistered) in reply to Civics Lessons

    I don't think it is the fact that taxes have to be paid, it's more that you don't fully appreciate exactly how much the actual real world value of 21% here and 20% there actually add up to. I am most definitely an adult (and have been for many years, in a legal sense anyway) and I am still surprised/disappointed at this.

  • Ulysses (unregistered)

    Why is it OK to express 'oh well' over popular adulthood epiphanies re: Santa, the Easter bunny, and government, but not a certain opposite sex? Oh noes, someone better put snoofle on the offender's list, smh.

  • sickened (unregistered) in reply to Bob

    Seriously dude? Who cares? Damned political correctness...get a life.

  • (nodebb) in reply to sickened

    I've linked to this before, but it's useful again now: http://www.xkcd.com/438/

    People say things for reasons. Bob makes a good point: if we don't want IT to continue being a sausage fest, then we need to make sure women feel comfortable in the industry, and language makes a difference. Sticks and stones can break bones, but words can break spirits, even strong ones. And in the long run that doesn't benefit anyone.

  • a woman (unregistered) in reply to jkshapiro

    Yo, dickwad, he meant gay people. I mean, the same argument applies, but you could have paid enough attention to make it correctly.

  • Me (unregistered) in reply to jkshapiro

    Patronize much? I'm not going to bend over backwards so someone can "feel welcome". I trust that my coworkers can engage in conversation without bursting into tears because someone uttered something uncomfortable but true.

  • (nodebb)

    Amongst all these comments about the "gubmint", or white-knighting for women/gays, I find it amazing no one complains about how the articles claims repeated instances of management stupidity, but doesn't provide concrete evidence for a single one.

    "only select one out of several radio buttons on screen" -- if the UI designer used radio buttons where it should have been checkboxes, that's not management being stupid.

    "Would you like to review your answers?" Yes, No, followed by two buttons: "Review" and "Continue" -- this is an atrocious UI design. Anyone with half a brain (i.e. not the pointy-hairs) should know to present the question unambiguously, so the pointy-hairs can't stack on further layers of stupid.

    "3 characters for a promotion code" "surname with a space." "same address, birthdate, and surname" "international phone numbers" "street addresses."

    I don't really see how any of these should be "hard problems", but they're all developer-based WTF's unless management somehow pre-emptively micromanaged bad assumptions about phone numbers, street addresses, or UI design -- none of which Snoofle articulates.

    "if (FileNotFound || FileFound) /Code/"

    I rest my case. The so-called Professionals were all software developers.

  • (nodebb)

    Professor Plum butchered the UI design in the Library with a Knife.

Leave a comment on “Coming of Age”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article