[off-topic] Sony releases PS Vita SDK

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 06:34:40PM +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> That is usually one of the arguments Go people use against generics.
> 
> I tend to call C++, D, C#, Ada and other languages with powerful
> abstraction mechanisms as programming languages for people with
> brains.
> 
> On my huge entreprise projects, I always despair with the amount of
> knowledge some developers have.

Thanks, now I can stop feeling like I'm the only one who feels that way
when I look at some ... shall I say, utterly atrocious code? ... in
enterprise projects at work.


> Every time I see certain types of enterprise code, I cannot even
> imagine how those developers would write in C, just to give an
> example.

You're lucky. I get to deal with _C code_ written by these kinds of
developers. Like recently when I reviewed some code to find that it was
using *string operations* for what should have been bitwise operations
(i.e., convert to string, do string ops, convert back). Or like some
time ago when we had to deal with a particular set of static tables that
had been copy-n-pasted EVERYWHERE, *and* reimplemented several times
over (incompletely and with gratuitously incompatible representations),
all mutually inconsistent but treated as though they were the same
table.

Just don't get me started on C++ code that had copy-n-pasted excerpts
from C code that broke in subtle ways because of language differences
that obviously the person who did it was completely oblivious to.


> Me I prefer to use languages with proper expression mechanisms, like
> D. Unfortunately the big guys prefer languages that allow for
> replaceable programmers.
[...]

Y'know, I'm starting to actually be glad that there's somewhere to send
those replaceable programmers instead of having them write more
horrendous C code than they already are. Send them to a Java shop,
problem solved. Reassign them to the PHP team and let them wreak havoc
there. Just keep them away from the mission-critical low-level code that
can't afford to break, no matter what.


T

-- 
Meat: euphemism for dead animal. -- Flora