[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[Paulo Pinto]

On Friday, 21 September 2012 at 19:09:48 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 03:54:21PM +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> [...]
>> In big corporations you spend more time taking care of existing
>> projects in big teams, than developing stuff from scratch.
>> 
>> In these type of environments you learn to appreciate the 
>> verbosity
>> of certain programming languages, and keep away from cute 
>> hacks.
>
> I have to say, this is very true. When I first got my current 
> job, I was
> appalled at the verbosity of the C code that I had to work 
> with. C
> code!! Not Java or any of that stuff. My manager told me to try 
> to
> conform to the (very verbose) style of the code. So I thought, 
> well
> they're paying me to do this, so I'll shut up and cope.
>
> After a few years, I started to like the verbosity (which is 
> saying a
> lot from a person like me -- I used to code with 2-space 
> indents),
> because it makes it so darned easy to read, to search, and to 
> spot
> stupid bugs. Identifier names are predictable, so you could 
> just guess
> the correct name and you'd be right most of the time. Makes it 
> easy to
> search for identifier usage in the ~2 million line codebase, 
> because the
> predictable pattern excludes (almost) all false positives.
>
> However:
>
>
>> Specially when you take into consideration the quality of work 
>> that
>> many programming drones are capable of.
> [...]
>
> Yeah, even the verbosity / consistent style of the code didn't 
> prevent
> people from doing stupid things with the code. Utterly stupid 
> things.
> My favorite example is a particular case of checking for IPv6 
> subnets by
> converting the subnet and IP address to strings and then using 
> string
> prefix comparison. Another example is a bunch of static 
> functions with
> identical names and identical contents, copy-n-pasted across 
> like 30
> modules (or worse, some copies are imperfect buggy versions).  
> It makes
> you wonder if the guy who wrote it even understands what code
> factorization means. Or "bug fixes" that consists of a whole 
> bunch of
> useless redundant code to "fix" a problem, that adds all sorts 
> of
> spurious buggy corner cases to the code and *doesn't actually 
> address
> the cause of the bug at all*. It boggles the mind how something 
> like
> that made it through code review.
>
> The saddest thing is that people are paying big bucks for this 
> kind of
> "enterprise" code. It's one of those things that make me never 
> want to
> pay for *any* kind of software... why waste the money when you 
> can
> download the OSS version for free? Yeah a lot of OSS code is 
> crap, but
> it's not like it's any worse than the crap you pay for.
>
> Sigh.
>
>
> T

Welcome to my world. As a Fortune 500 outsourcing consulting 
company
employee, I see this type of code everyday.

--
Paulo