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!

«‹›1503 »

Spatial: Nov 15, 2007

C is perfectly balanced for smug superiority. It being terrible is actually a great thing if you know it extremely well and can avoid the gotchas while looking down on the poor fools shooting their own feet constantly. It being terrible keeps you employed for life and gives you the status of being a respected expert. Thank goodness it's terrible! :v:

C++ is truly the ultimate successor to C when you think about it that way lol

# ? Mar 1, 2022 20:12

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 17, 2024 14:20

rjmccall: Sep 7, 2007; no worries friend; Fun Shoe

As a professional C++ programmer, I have a lot of criticisms of the language, but the idea that it doesn�t effectively address any of the problems of C is pretty silly. You don�t get hard static guarantees, so yes, you can still write a one-liner that completely subverts the language. Nonetheless, if you use the basic tools the language gives you (destructors for resource management, lambdas for scoping), you can make large classes of bugs much harder to introduce by accident. That is valuable even if it�s imperfect.

# ? Mar 1, 2022 20:40

ExcessBLarg!: Sep 1, 2001

I'd agree that disciplined, consistent use of a subset of C++ is safe, and maybe inherently safer than "conventional" C or C++. It's also true that disciplined, consistent use of C with modern APIs can also be done safely. There's a tradeoff in the overall complexity of the language (and perhaps the assembly generated by the compiler) and programmer convenience.

Both of those statements stand in contrast to something like Rust, for which safety was a fundamental point of design.

# ? Mar 1, 2022 20:46

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Spatial posted:

Simply do not make mistakes. A great strategy except that it never ever works and will never work.

The C language cannot fail, it can only be failed.

# ? Mar 1, 2022 21:11

BigPaddy: Jun 30, 2008; That night we performed the rite and opened the gate.
Halfway through, I went to fix us both a coke float.
By the time I got back, he'd gone insane.
Plus, he'd left the gate open and there was evil everywhere.

C/C++ are great when people know what they are doing ergo we are doomed.

# ? Mar 1, 2022 22:24

wolfman101: Feb 8, 2004; PCXL Fanboy

I am partial to �you need a testing team, but it should be rare for bugs to slip past your dev teams automated testing�

# ? Mar 2, 2022 02:16

BigPaddy: Jun 30, 2008; That night we performed the rite and opened the gate.
Halfway through, I went to fix us both a coke float.
By the time I got back, he'd gone insane.
Plus, he'd left the gate open and there was evil everywhere.

Quickly followed by a hearty chuckle from all on the call and back to throwing in more scope by cutting dev time spent on automated tests.

# ? Mar 2, 2022 02:34

more falafel please: Feb 26, 2005; forums poster

16 years and I've never worked on a project with automated testing beyond "run the game in attract mode overnight and fix the crash tomorrow"

# ? Mar 2, 2022 06:21

Xarn: Jun 26, 2015

Tei posted:

These are outside the toolbox. You are going to build whatever using the tools inside the toolbox and undefined behaviors are whatever. You simply stay away from them. If you code depend on a undefined behavior, your code is kind of crap, even if your binary works.

I can never tell whether you are trolling or not.

# ? Mar 2, 2022 15:13

Tei: Feb 19, 2011

Xarn posted:

I can never tell whether you are trolling or not.

I have bad opinions

# ? Mar 2, 2022 17:55

Beef: Jul 26, 2004

rjmccall posted:

As a professional C++ programmer, I have a lot of criticisms of the language, but the idea that it doesn�t effectively address any of the problems of C is pretty silly. You don�t get hard static guarantees, so yes, you can still write a one-liner that completely subverts the language. Nonetheless, if you use the basic tools the language gives you (destructors for resource management, lambdas for scoping), you can make large classes of bugs much harder to introduce by accident. That is valuable even if it�s imperfect.

Yep. I am more confident in C++ than C that once my code compiles, it will run.

But, debugging C is piss-easy compared to C++. I've ripped out the C++ parts of compilation units and replaced the code with plain C in the quest to find bugs or performance issues.

# ? Mar 2, 2022 20:39

wolfman101: Feb 8, 2004; PCXL Fanboy

quote:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use automated testing." Now they have two problems.

# ? Mar 3, 2022 00:38

leper khan: Dec 28, 2010; Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

smackfu posted:

The classic logic applies here:

Yeah but at least they understand one of them.

# ? Mar 3, 2022 00:47

Bongo Bill: Jan 17, 2012

Good testing is possible and I hope you don't give up on trying to attain it.

# ? Mar 3, 2022 01:30

Junkiebev: Jan 18, 2002; Feel the progress.

60 minutes into "the kubernetes cluster is broken - our app works fine", I ask to look at their code

code:

doathing(string input)
{
  try{BUNCH OF BUSINESS LOGIC}
  catch(exception e)
  {
     doathing(input);
     log(e.message);
  }
}

"Our logs don't show any errors"
:goonsay:

LET ME TELL YOU WHY, MY GOOD BITCH

# ? Mar 3, 2022 05:39

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Volmarias posted:

This sounds like game dev, though, unless maybe possibly if you're writing the engine and plan to keep it around for a few years.

As someone whose worked in service games for most of my career, I can confirm. The thinking is emblematic of the older boxed game model, where code bases were often thrown away after the game launched.

Games can absolutely be put under test. I know because I've done it and seen it done. Unfortunately, the state of QA in the industry means this work isn't generally valued highly.

Successful games today have lifespans of a decade or more. They're effectively indistinguishable from a tech startup. The only reason some people in games think games can't be tested is because they don't exert any effort trying to or learning how to write code that's easy to test.

# ? Mar 3, 2022 11:36

Nolgthorn: Jan 30, 2001; The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense

Junkiebev posted:

"Our logs don't show any errors"

There isn't a court that wouldn't convict.

# ? Mar 3, 2022 12:37

D34THROW: Jan 29, 2012; RETAIL RETAIL LISTEN TO ME BITCH ABOUT RETAIL

Junkiebev posted:

60 minutes into "the kubernetes cluster is broken - our app works fine", I ask to look at their code
code:
doathing(string input)
{
  try{BUNCH OF BUSINESS LOGIC}
  catch(exception e)
  {
     doathing(input);
     log(e.message);
  }
}
"Our logs don't show any errors"

LET ME TELL YOU WHY, MY GOOD BITCH

You're putting one over on us right?

_{I want to believe} :smithicide:

# ? Mar 3, 2022 13:27

BigPaddy: Jun 30, 2008; That night we performed the rite and opened the gate.
Halfway through, I went to fix us both a coke float.
By the time I got back, he'd gone insane.
Plus, he'd left the gate open and there was evil everywhere.

If I make my logging unreachable then the app will never have errors. Genius.

# ? Mar 3, 2022 14:10

NihilCredo: Jun 6, 2011; iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt

They didn't even see a stack overflow? :raise:

# ? Mar 3, 2022 14:28

Ola: Jul 19, 2004

NihilCredo posted:

They didn't even see a stack overflow?

They did, and they tried googling to find out what that meant, but they just found a bunch of friendly explanations on how to implement fizzbuzz.

# ? Mar 3, 2022 14:41

BigPaddy: Jun 30, 2008; That night we performed the rite and opened the gate.
Halfway through, I went to fix us both a coke float.
By the time I got back, he'd gone insane.
Plus, he'd left the gate open and there was evil everywhere.

NihilCredo posted:

They didn't even see a stack overflow?

I am not seeing the error I expect ergo it is an infrastructure problem.

# ? Mar 3, 2022 14:55

Polio Vax Scene: Apr 5, 2009

Ticket resolved: Add ∞ memory to target machine to avoid stack overflow error

# ? Mar 3, 2022 15:06

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Ola posted:

They did, and they tried googling to find out what that meant, but they just found a bunch of friendly explanations on how to implement fizzbuzz.

FizzBuzzEE once again shows the community its importance and value

# ? Mar 3, 2022 19:19

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

FizzBuzz.ai

# ? Mar 3, 2022 19:23

wolfman101: Feb 8, 2004; PCXL Fanboy

Bongo Bill posted:

Good testing is possible and I hope you don't give up on trying to attain it.

This. Also, learn to love encapsulation and stateless functions if you want to get the most out of testing.

# ? Mar 4, 2022 02:13

spiritual bypass: Feb 19, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Polio Vax Scene posted:

Ticket resolved: Add ∞ memory to target machine to avoid stack overflow error

This reminds me of a bad technical sales call I had once for web hosting product. The prospect said "whaddya mean it doesn't have unlimited disk space? Isn't this an enterprise offering??"

# ? Mar 4, 2022 02:19

lifg: Dec 4, 2000; <this tag left blank>; Muldoon

Junkiebev posted:

60 minutes into "the kubernetes cluster is broken - our app works fine", I ask to look at their code
code:
doathing(string input)
{
  try{BUNCH OF BUSINESS LOGIC}
  catch(exception e)
  {
     doathing(input);
     log(e.message);
  }
}
"Our logs don't show any errors"

LET ME TELL YOU WHY, MY GOOD BITCH

That reminds me of an internal software that I had to manage in my first job (a long time ago), and as I was reading it I realized that the programmer was learning to code while he wrote it.

The software had ten distinct steps, and in each step he was slowly getting better and better with errors. Like in step 1 he didn�t know that mysql_query() could fail. In step 2 he�d check mysql_error(), but literally ignore it. In step 3, he�d echo the error to the screen, but would just continue to the next step. In step 4 he�d check for an error, and if one happened he�d just try again, and this time he wouldn�t check for an error.

Frankly it was a work of art. I wish I�d preserved it.

# ? Mar 4, 2022 04:15

Nolgthorn: Jan 30, 2001; The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense

wolfman101 posted:

This. Also, learn to love encapsulation and stateless functions if you want to get the most out of testing.

Stateless is the way. I don't understand why every classroom I ever attended tried teaching me object oriented.

# ? Mar 4, 2022 09:05

chglcu: May 17, 2007; I'm so bored with the USA.