Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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NtotheTC: Dec 31, 2007

bucketmouse posted:

That lead me indirectly to this.

https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar/blob/master/README.md

e: if nothing else, ctrl-f "Interesting features" on that page

You've linked to the same page there.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 09:06

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# ? May 16, 2024 23:37

evilentity: Jun 25, 2010

bucketmouse posted:

That lead me indirectly to this.

https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar/blob/master/README.md

e: if nothing else, ctrl-f "Interesting features" on that page

Only thing I can think of is why. Why would anyone in right mind invent this abomination. And comments are illegal. I mean WTF? You can make comments in brainfuck for fucks sake. Its like someone who never saw code invented language and all he knew, was that computers work well with numbers.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 15:29

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

evilentity posted:

Only thing I can think of is why. Why would anyone in right mind invent this abomination. And comments are illegal. I mean WTF? You can make comments in brainfuck for fucks sake. Its like someone who never saw code invented language and all he knew, was that computers work well with numbers.

If you read up on the history it makes more sense. It was never intended to be a programming language - rather it's the IR/opcodes and immediates for a VM that you were supposed to program via a quasi-wysisyg RAD environment that was so bad the programmers found it easier to just write the IR themselves.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 15:48

Strong Sauce: Jul 2, 2003; You know I am not really your father.

I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 17:15

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

bucketmouse posted:

That lead me indirectly to this.

https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar/blob/master/README.md

e: if nothing else, ctrl-f "Interesting features" on that page

Why would they program in this directly, even with the tools they wrote? Would it have been that hard to write a C compiler for it? Or any kind of compiler, really. If the original tools for generating the machine code sucked that much, how long do you spend wading in that poo poo before you realize that making a high level compiler would save tons of time?

# ? Sep 4, 2013 17:42

JawnV6: Jul 4, 2004; So hot ...

How accessible were those tools in 1990? That's when the super NES came out, and most of those games were still hand-rolled asm.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 17:52

Amarkov: Jun 21, 2010

I mean, like, I can understand not wanting to go to the trouble of writing a compiler; it takes a *lot* of working with it to justify that. But why would you not at least wrap the parser with something that lets you have comments?

# ? Sep 4, 2013 17:55

Movac: Oct 31, 2012

Slanderer posted:

Why would they program in this directly, even with the tools they wrote? Would it have been that hard to write a C compiler for it? Or any kind of compiler, really. If the original tools for generating the machine code sucked that much, how long do you spend wading in that poo poo before you realize that making a high level compiler would save tons of time?

There's a bunch of discussion over in the Hacker News thread, but here's the most pertinent comment (emphasis mine):

jloughry@hn posted:

Mostly, it was lack of time; keeping up with compliance changes is a full-time job at any bank, and there wasn't time for 'science projects'. What tools did get written were done to scratch a personal itch, and were done late at night and on weekends, outside of work hours.

I think, as I said in an earlier comment, that there was a general lack of awareness amongst the programmers on the team that anything better was possible. Most were not computer science graduates. Professional programmers they were. But I'll bet money that most had never heard of trees.

Management interest evolved over time from indifferent to actively hostile. The first generation LIST annotator improved productivity of the team and reduced errors probably at least fifty percent. Management took no notice at the time. Improvements to the tool, also developed out-of-hours, finally met with angry demands from management to stop and bury the results. Shortly afterwards the entire team was laid off.

Sometimes I get glimpses of this parallel programming culture where improving skills or tools beyond the bare spartan minimum to get today's to-do list finished is considered a waste of time, and it scares the hell out of me. If that type ran computing, we'd still be using punch cards.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 17:56

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

JawnV6 posted:

How accessible were those tools in 1990? That's when the super NES came out, and most of those games were still hand-rolled asm.

Now that I think of it I wonder why they didn't at least make up assembly mnemonics for each IR opcode and bang out an assembler for their made up assembly language instead of working directly w/ opcodes.

e: oh i see now

Movac posted:

There's a bunch of discussion over in the Hacker News thread, but here's the most pertinent comment (emphasis mine):

Sometimes I get glimpses of this parallel programming culture where improving skills or tools beyond the bare spartan minimum to get today's to-do list finished is considered a waste of time, and it scares the hell out of me. If that type ran computing, we'd still be using punch cards.

;_;

# ? Sep 4, 2013 17:56

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

They eventually did write tools for it, but the original group of developers that switched to writing the opcodes directly were ex-mainframe guys that had been doing that sort of thing their entire career and so were pretty good at it and didn't properly consider that there were better ways to do it.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 17:57

HFX: Nov 29, 2004

Plorkyeran posted:

They eventually did write tools for it, but the original group of developers that switched to writing the opcodes directly were ex-mainframe guys that had been doing that sort of thing their entire career and so were pretty good at it and didn't properly consider that there were better ways to do it.

The fact those ex mainframe guys still write code like that no matter what language is a real horror.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 20:06

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

Plorkyeran posted:

They eventually did write tools for it, but the original group of developers that switched to writing the opcodes directly were ex-mainframe guys that had been doing that sort of thing their entire career and so were pretty good at it and didn't properly consider that there were better ways to do it.

This is why I always try to immerse myself in new poo poo all the time.

I never want to be those guys.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 21:20

JawnV6: Jul 4, 2004; So hot ...

You can go too far off that end as well, you know the type of programmer who went from perl to php to ruby to rails to django to flask to python to never learning how to do one thing well, just how to tweak the language/framework du jour.

I can see how a constrained environment that had already been burned on tooling once would eschew it. All it takes is another debug that root-causes to an error in the mnemonics that takes a day or two to sour on the whole proposition.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 22:03

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

JawnV6 posted:

You can go too far off that end as well, you know the type of programmer who went from perl to php to ruby to rails to django to flask to python to never learning how to do one thing well, just how to tweak the language/framework du jour.

Yeah, definitely. A nice compromise is to bounce between poo poo for side projects for breadth while mastering the technology you use professionally, but obviously that breaks down if you find yourself no longer having time for side projects.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 22:21

npe: Oct 15, 2004

Movac posted:

Sometimes I get glimpses of this parallel programming culture where improving skills or tools beyond the bare spartan minimum to get today's to-do list finished is considered a waste of time, and it scares the hell out of me. If that type ran computing, we'd still be using punch cards.

This happens maybe more often than people realize. In my experience it can occur when a programming group is directly subservient to a business group engaged in something profitable but repetitive.

Programming is odd in that the work you do can directly lead to making that same work easier and better - but to a business line, this may not be acceptable for "moral" reasons. They're paying you to make THEIR work easier and better, not to improve your own lot, and if they have to slog through repetitive tasks day in and day out, the programmers shouldn't get it any easier. This means that "I did it on my own time" won't always keep you in the clear - I've been trashed for that, too. It's far better to keep any improvements completely off the radar.

I realize people will think I'm full of poo poo, but I've worked in the legal software industry for years and have been lectured at length about this hostility. "Programmers think they are so special. Well, they should suffer like the rest of us."

# ? Sep 5, 2013 02:26

Lain Iwakura: Aug 5, 2004; The body exists only to verify one's own existence.; Taco Defender

Sometimes you find great coding examples outside of Github:
https://canary.pw/search/?q=mysql_connect+-localhost

(Yes. This is me shamelessly linking my own website.)

# ? Sep 5, 2013 04:20

Gazpacho: Jun 18, 2004; by Fluffdaddy; Slippery Tilde

Movac posted:

Sometimes I get glimpses of this parallel programming culture where improving skills or tools beyond the bare spartan minimum to get today's to-do list finished is considered a waste of time, and it scares the hell out of me. If that type ran computing, we'd still be using punch cards.

What should really scare you is that, given the wrong incentives (a steady flow of needed-yesterday tasks and a "culture of frugality"), you too would become a knuckle-dragger.

# ? Sep 5, 2013 10:37

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Dependencies can trip you up as well, especially if you develop for a platform that's based on obsolete technologies. Sharepoint only recently moved on to .Net 4.5, so there was no point in studying the Task Parallel Library or async/await. It's still based on ASP.Net 2.0, so no MVC or Razor will be used here.

# ? Sep 5, 2013 11:52

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Gazpacho posted:

What should really scare you is that, given the wrong incentives (a steady flow of needed-yesterday tasks and a "culture of frugality"), you too would become a knuckle-dragger.

Yep, there really doesn't need to be a lot. Any project manager that makes a habit of dropping deliverables needed today on your task list will kill any dreams of optimising process. You'll end up with hours estimates pared down to the minimum, so they'll just stack up the tasks and you'll be unable to get the time to go beyond getting it working to getting it working well. Eventually you'll resist change reflexively, and stunt your growth as a developer.

Basically, don't get chained to these jobs for too long cause they're 100% poison.

# ? Sep 5, 2013 12:34

New Yorp New Yorp: Jul 18, 2003; Only in Kenya.; Pillbug

Maluco Marinero posted:

Yep, there really doesn't need to be a lot. Any project manager that makes a habit of dropping deliverables needed today on your task list will kill any dreams of optimising process. You'll end up with hours estimates pared down to the minimum, so they'll just stack up the tasks and you'll be unable to get the time to go beyond getting it working to getting it working well. Eventually you'll resist change reflexively, and stunt your growth as a developer.

Basically, don't get chained to these jobs for too long cause they're 100% poison.

One of my friends recently got a job where the business routinely says, "We don't mind if it takes longer, we're more concerned with quality and improving our process".

I accused him of getting a job in Bizarro World.

# ? Sep 5, 2013 13:11

prefect: Sep 11, 2001; No one, Woodhouse.
No one.; Dead Man’s Band

Ithaqua posted:

One of my friends recently got a job where the business routinely says, "We don't mind if it takes longer, we're more concerned with quality and improving our process".

I accused him of getting a job in Bizarro World.

Are you sure he's not lying to you?

# ? Sep 5, 2013 13:14

New Yorp New Yorp: Jul 18, 2003; Only in Kenya.; Pillbug

prefect posted:

Are you sure he's not lying to you?

Pretty sure. The business has been burned so much that they're happy to spend a few extra hours on quality. He was hired to take over their dev team, and the previous guy wasn't altogether competent. He regales me with stories of discovering that business-critical applications have horrible, revenue-losing bugs, and also aren't in source control. Or that developers don't think twice about patching code directly in production, so no one has any clue if what's in source control even accurately reflects what's in production.

# ? Sep 5, 2013 13:20

Don Mega: Nov 26, 2005

My last employer did not even use source control. We would just copy the source with a new name and the date appended after it, butt_shipper.pl.090513 :suicide:

# ? Sep 5, 2013 16:14

Doctor w-rw-rw-: Jun 24, 2008

Maluco Marinero posted:

Yep, there really doesn't need to be a lot. Any project manager that makes a habit of dropping deliverables needed today on your task list will kill any dreams of optimising process. You'll end up with hours estimates pared down to the minimum, so they'll just stack up the tasks and you'll be unable to get the time to go beyond getting it working to getting it working well. Eventually you'll resist change reflexively, and stunt your growth as a developer.

Basically, don't get chained to these jobs for too long cause they're 100% poison.

you just described my previous two jobs. The reflexive resistance to change is definitely a thing and it's a real killer.

# ? Sep 5, 2013 17:15

Dr Monkeysee: Oct 11, 2002; just a fox like a hundred thousand others; Nap Ghost

Don Mega posted:

My last employer did not even use source control. We would just copy the source with a new name and the date appended after it, butt_shipper.pl.090513

It amazes me not only that this still happens today but it seems to be a "solution" reached independently by bad developers everywhere. It's a sort of convergent evolution of dumb.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 01:03

Janitor Prime: Jan 22, 2004; PC LOAD LETTER

What da fuck does that mean; Fun Shoe

In the absence of vc software that's the easiest (read lazyiest) solution to reach.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 01:30

pokeyman: Nov 26, 2006; That elephant ate my entire platoon.

Hard NOP Life posted:

In the absence of vc software that's the easiest (read lazyiest) solution to reach.

And it's several orders of magnitude easier to use than git. It's inexcusable for a professional software shop, but if the software's tangential and/or unprofessional, I'm with you, it's the easiest thing that can work.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 02:39

unixbeard: Dec 29, 2004

A team I sat next to had this really weird senior dev. They were using clearcase, and basically everyone would email him their changes for the week on friday, and he would manually merge and commit things once a week.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 03:24

New Yorp New Yorp: Jul 18, 2003; Only in Kenya.; Pillbug

Just bumped into this in a client's codebase:

C# code:

   string firstLetter = category.DisplayName.Substring(0, 1);

   if ("0123456789".IndexOf(firstLetter) != -1)
   {
      //irrelevant stuff
   }

It's not horribly horrible, just silly. They could've just done if (char.IsNumber(firstLetter))

# ? Sep 6, 2013 03:30

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

unixbeard posted:

A team I sat next to had this really weird senior dev. They were using clearcase, and basically everyone would email him their changes for the week on friday, and he would manually merge and commit things once a week.

That's the least painful way to use ClearCase.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 03:32

Sinestro: Oct 31, 2010; The perfect day needs the perfect set of wheels.

Using ClearCase is like volunteering to get mugged so you can then have a icepick jammed in your eye socket.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 04:44

pseudorandom name: May 6, 2007

Monkeyseesaw posted:

It amazes me not only that this still happens today but it seems to be a "solution" reached independently by bad developers everywhere. It's a sort of convergent evolution of dumb.

I have it on good authority that version control at Wind River consists of a bunch of ISO-9660 disc images.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 04:59

b0lt: Apr 29, 2005

Ithaqua posted:

They could've just done if (char.IsNumber(firstLetter))

௲

# ? Sep 6, 2013 05:06

New Yorp New Yorp: Jul 18, 2003; Only in Kenya.; Pillbug

b0lt posted:

௲

I don't think unicode support is high on their list of priorities.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 05:58

EssOEss: Oct 23, 2006; 128-bit approved

I believe his point was that there are a lot more numbers than 0-9, so the two snippets are not equivalent.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 07:21

b0lt: Apr 29, 2005

The real solution, of course is char x = category.DisplayName[0]; if (x >= '0' && x <= '9') { ... }

# ? Sep 6, 2013 07:58

HFX: Nov 29, 2004

unixbeard posted:

A team I sat next to had this really weird senior dev. They were using clearcase, and basically everyone would email him their changes for the week on friday, and he would manually merge and commit things once a week.

It is like merge request only done manually and without diff patches....

pokeyman posted:

And it's several orders of magnitude easier to use than git. It's inexcusable for a professional software shop, but if the software's tangential and/or unprofessional, I'm with you, it's the easiest thing that can work.

Git is pretty easy to get the same effect once you learn a couple basic commands. I usually find the hardest part with git is to get developers to understand the concept of no central repo. Well that, and getting them to start making commits of less then 1000 lines at a time.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 15:20

Ganondork: Dec 26, 2012; Ganondork

HFX posted:

Git is pretty easy to get the same effect once you learn a couple basic commands. I usually find the hardest part with git is to get developers to understand the concept of no central repo. Well that, and getting them to start making commits of less then 1000 lines at a time.

Agreed. I found that git adds greater complexity to maintaining a "repo", and removes complexity from managing code during development. Once I understood how it tracks and merges code through the use of pointers, it made me wonder how I stayed sane without it. We definitely had some bumps at work moving from SVN to git, but it was definitely worth every headache; however, there were some that definitely made their opinions known when it came to this change, or really any change in their development process.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 16:55

Bognar: Aug 4, 2011; I am the queen of France; Hot Rope Guy

HFX posted:

Well that, and getting them to start making commits of less then 1000 lines at a time.

This is an issue for a few select people here. They treat source control more as a way to save your work at the end of the day, rather than a series of individual modifications, and think that it's too much work to commit after each logical set of changes.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 18:12

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# ? May 16, 2024 23:37

Dr Monkeysee: Oct 11, 2002; just a fox like a hundred thousand others; Nap Ghost

This may be unpopular but I think git is a bit of a coding horror in the fact that it fails to really hide any details of its implementation and makes source control more complicated than it should be. I really didn't grok git until I realized my branches were pointers and my commits were nodes in a graph. I've never had to understand the internals of any source control system like that before.

This is coming from someone who uses git at work and likes git and understands how it's more empowering than, say, SVN but the learning curve on it is much sharper than it could (and should) be.

# ? Sep 6, 2013 20:42

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