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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Spatial: Nov 15, 2007

EpicCodeMonkey posted:

can't compile files in parallel

They added this in the latest version. See, miracles do happen. :v:

And hey! Autocomplete sometimes works now!

In the previous version they introduced a bug where volatile qualifiers were incorrectly ignored in some circumstances, leading to some amazing bugs and weird behaviours. It's a pretty loving serious problem in an embedded micro when you're reading hardware status registers to see if you can exit a loop and it's doing this instead:

code:

load r0, <thing>

loop:
  cmp r0,
  bne loop // branch always taken

Spatial fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Mar 29, 2015

# ? Mar 29, 2015 03:07

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# ? Jun 8, 2024 02:13

Corla Plankun: May 8, 2007; improve the lives of everyone

EpicCodeMonkey posted:

Are management horrors still classed as coding horrors?

At my current workplace everyone not involved in the actual coding/development part of the project constantly throws in their own two cents on what tooling we should use. That includes even the company CEO, who used his local mouthpiece to tell us that we shouldn't be migrating to GCC, and we should instead stick with the >$5000/seat compiler he likes, despite not giving any reasons to do so or having anything to do with the coding side himself. All this, despite money being so tight we can't afford to get another proprietary license to build test our code on a build server. All that time and work wasted based on an "intuitive feeling that the more expensive one is better" despite all technical arguments we make to the contrary.

Now we're about to spool up another project, and I'm already getting directions on what RTOS and compiler we should use from the same people ("the proprietary ones!"), despite not even having the official SDK up and running yet. Whelp.

I worked for a place like this for a while and quickly discovered that I made the same amount of cash whether I worked or just sent resumes out all day, so I started doing the latter.

# ? Mar 29, 2015 03:38

yippee cahier: Mar 28, 2005

Ugh, I'm in a similar situation. No one believes me when I say a component is browning out or otherwise resetting itself, so I have been tasked with days of driver rewrites to eliminate good interrupt driven design and move back to a polling loop "like we used to do back when we launched first_product". Why doesn't anyone believe me? Because first_product works fine on a completely different hardware platform, with a different model of component and years of bug fixes.

Often I have to bring people up to speed on how we're actually doing things in code so they can revise their far-fetched ideas why it doesn't work. It was suggested that I was overwhelming the resetting component with commands, despite using hardware flow control and only issuing the next command after getting and validating the response to the previous one. Result? Now I have work issue to test the interface with a dummy command before every real command. I'm about to double the number of commands hitting this supposedly overloaded command interface!

# ? Mar 29, 2015 04:47

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

kitten smoothie posted:

Older devices? Zawinski was blogging just a few months ago about lovely cheap Android "smart tv" boxes that all had the same MAC address burned into them. Seemed like a cheap way to run advertising on a TV screen except you can have only one

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/flyer-screens-2/

Otherwise you need some kind of per unit step on the manufacturing floor to change the MAC and that costs money and you (the Chinese factory) can get away without it :shobon:

# ? Mar 29, 2015 13:45

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

sund posted:

Often I have to bring people up to speed on how we're actually doing things in code so they can revise their far-fetched ideas why it doesn't work.

I'm always amazed at the wildly incorrect mental models of things that people can come up with. "How do you think this works?" can usually get some crazy responses. It makes me wonder how many things I have ridiculous assumptions about and don't know it.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 01:32

HappyHippo: Nov 19, 2003; Do you have an Air Miles Card?

Some good stuff in this paper

quote:

An interesting code-reuse strategy was observed for participant P7. The task was to re-implement an already existing functionality from another customer-specific version of the application. P7 copied big blocks of code containing several methods and "deactivated" the whole copied code by commenting it out. Then he looked at compiler warnings that indicated that a certain method was not found by the compiler. Following these warnings, P7 removed the comments and "reactivated" the appropriate methods. P7 applied this strategy repeatedly until all compiler warnings disappeared. Using this strategy, P7 traced which methods in the copied code were really needed. With this strategy, P7 did not try to understand how each method works.

quote:

P3 used the compiler to search for locations where a specific constant is used. He changed the name of that constant in its definition and examined the locations of the resulting compiler errors.
...
P3 was working in ECLIPSE that provides the feature REFERENCES for retrieving such a list of constant usage. When asked about the motivation behind this behavior, P3 answered that he did not know the ECLIPSE feature despite of eight years of professional experience and six years using ECLIPSE.

quote:

Naming conventions played a central role for company C5. Three participants from C5 even used a self-developed translator that transformed cryptic names of functions and variables into a meaningful human readable form, which helped to get a better understanding of the software.

quote:

P15 reported that it is often unclear how the end user uses the application and that he has limited knowledge about the application domain.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 06:42

Hammerite: Mar 9, 2007; And you don't remember what I said here, either, but it was pompous and stupid.; Jade Ear Joe

HappyHippo posted:

P15 reported that it is often unclear how the end user uses the application and that he has limited knowledge about the application domain.

I think this (not knowing how the end users actually use the software) is a very easy trap to fall into. The big project I have worked on at my place benefits from the fact that we speak to the end users of the main software package directly and occasionally visit them on site (and from the fact that we get regular dumps of their database, because it isn't secret or confidential data). This is helpful in making sure we make the software do the things that actually help them do their jobs.

Limited knowledge of the application domain sounds like a training gap. We are in a somewhat specialised field that I didn't know much about before I came here, but we get training (and there are lots of people to ask questions) so that we have enough of a clue.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 12:34

Athas: Aug 6, 2007; fuck that joker

EpicCodeMonkey posted:

Welcome to the world of embedded systems, where IAR pays vendors to ensure they get first support of all chips so there's little choice when they hit the market. Their wonderful IDE reminiscent of Windows 3.1 that crashes all the time, uses a crazy XML project format (ASCII encoded binary, comma separated in a single XML node for some settings) and can't compile files in parallel could fill up this thread.

http://www.futureelectronics.com/en/Technologies/Product.aspx?ProductID=EWARMIARSYSTEMS5016703&IM=0e t

That's USD$6000 a seat actually, but you can find it for USD$5000 if you shop around.

It is your moral imperative to ensure that the hacks behind this compiler lose customers. Holy poo poo. I am amazed that open source web development is apparently not even close to being the worst software development cesspit.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 12:50

Pavlov: Oct 21, 2012; I've long been fascinated with how the alt-right develops elaborate and obscure dog whistles to try to communicate their meaning without having to say it out loud
Stepan Andreyevich Bandera being the most prominent example of that

Athas posted:

It is your moral imperative to ensure that the hacks behind this compiler lose customers. Holy poo poo. I am amazed that open source web development is apparently not even close to being the worst software development cesspit.

Remember, a lot of the same people who do open source development also have day jobs programming, but at their jobs they can also keep all their code secret and have an incentive to squeeze all the money out of the end user that they can.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 15:15

Karate Bastard: Jul 31, 2007; Can't post for 3 hours!; Soiled Meat

Commercial web development / hosting? Pay to enter content into web ui, content no longer under your control. It went down? When did this happen? You lost content? What did you lose? No we don't have failover. Backup? Sure we do, from April. That's what's up now, dummy. And you can't sidestep us because politics nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah

# ? Mar 30, 2015 15:47

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

Athas posted:

It is your moral imperative to ensure that the hacks behind this compiler lose customers. Holy poo poo. I am amazed that open source web development is apparently not even close to being the worst software development cesspit.

Open source is a transparent cesspit.

I can almost see the argument, then I have to touch that godforsaken Cube and lose my composure. Why it can't just chuck out a gcc compatible BSP is beyond me.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 16:10

Munkeymon: Aug 14, 2003; Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.

HappyHippo posted:

Some good stuff in this paper

Can anyone ever really know Eclipse?

# ? Mar 30, 2015 17:50

cat_snake: Nov 19, 2014

Found this comment when I merged code today:

// 3/29/15 - [MCF] May be overstepping but I want to fix an error. I recognize that we need to figure why this would be necessary

Basically he just caught the exception in order to ignore it (that was the fix), and doesn't tell any of the developers responsible for this part of the code that there was a problem. So yeah, I guess we'll just wait until bad data starts blowing everything up, good plan.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 17:54

Spatial: Nov 15, 2007

Athas posted:

It is your moral imperative to ensure that the hacks behind this compiler lose customers. Holy poo poo. I am amazed that open source web development is apparently not even close to being the worst software development cesspit.

We plan to ditch it for the next project.

There's significant pushback from on high about doing that though. Maybe they and the IAR guys are friends. There sure isn't any other reason to use it.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 19:44

Evil_Greven: Feb 20, 2007; Whadda I got to,
whadda I got to do
to wake ya up?

To shake ya up,
to break the structure up!?

If anyone was wondering why GitHub has been loving unresponsive the last few days, well... here's a political/technology horror for you that impacts coding:
China Appears to Attack GitHub by Diverting Web Traffic

The New York Times posted:

But in a recent series of attacks on websites that try to help Internet users in China circumvent this censorship, the Great Firewall appears to have been used instead as a weapon, diverting a portion of the torrents of Internet traffic that flow through it to overload targeted websites.

Welp, that might explain issues I had with it this weekend.

quote:

The New York Times declined to comment on the attacks

# ? Mar 30, 2015 21:33

TheresaJayne: Jul 1, 2011

Some of the horrors i see are here

http://starlogs.net/#calclavia/Voltz-Mod-Pack

The problem is, - Is it that site or the content of the commits...

# ? Mar 31, 2015 06:28

teamdest: Jul 1, 2007

TheresaJayne posted:

Some of the horrors i see are here

http://starlogs.net/#calclavia/Voltz-Mod-Pack

The problem is, - Is it that site or the content of the commits...

Posting minecraft mods is cheating.

# ? Mar 31, 2015 14:39

zokie: Feb 13, 2006; Out of many, Sweden

code:

if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(person.FirstName + " " + person.LastName))
{
	// do stuff
}

I just don't know what to say...

# ? Apr 1, 2015 08:49

Tank Boy Ken: Aug 24, 2012; J4G for life; Fallen Rib

zokie posted:

code:

if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(person.FirstName + " " + person.LastName))
{
	// do stuff
}

I just don't know what to say...

You want to say that he should have used "if(true)" to save on typing. Admit it!

. Sorry, I'm a horrible jerk.

# ? Apr 1, 2015 10:03

Che Delilas: Nov 23, 2009; FREE TIBET WEED

zokie posted:

I just don't know what to say...

I wonder if he was trying to do IsNullOrWhitespace and Intellisensed his way into the wrong function and didn't notice.

# ? Apr 1, 2015 10:27

TheresaJayne: Jul 1, 2011

i know this is another minecraft commit trail but OMG this dev is completely out of his mind look at the commits....

https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeAPI/pull/526

# ? Apr 1, 2015 12:35

seiken: Feb 7, 2005; hah ha ha

TheresaJayne posted:

i know this is another minecraft commit trail but OMG this dev is completely out of his mind look at the commits....

https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeAPI/pull/526

You realise it's an April Fool's joke?

# ? Apr 1, 2015 12:43

1337JiveTurkey: Feb 17, 2005

seiken posted:

You realise it's an April Fool's joke?

Java conforms with all relevant ISO Standards regarding Poe's Law.

# ? Apr 1, 2015 13:09

TheresaJayne: Jul 1, 2011

seiken posted:

You realise it's an April Fool's joke?

I am on the Sponge Dev team, of course i know

Its still terrible

# ? Apr 1, 2015 13:23

Stephen: Feb 6, 2004; Stoned

Got to review this lovely function written in PHP today by my coworker. I guess technically speaking it works, but I guess he isn't aware you can break out of loops.

code:

		$valid=false;
		if (count($arr)) {
			$merged=true;
			foreach ($arr as $o) {
				$merged = $merged && ($o['status']=='merged');
			}
			$valid = !$merged;
		}
		return $valid;

# ? Apr 1, 2015 22:50

Centripetal Horse: Nov 22, 2009; Fuck money, get GBS

This could have bought you a half a tank of gas, lmfao -
Love, gromdul

TheresaJayne posted:

Its still terrible

Needs more framework. The users will break it in no time.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 00:16

DARPA Dad: Dec 9, 2008

Coding horrors: Kickstarter edition https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1091981218/pythor-a-premier-web-programming-language

# ? Apr 2, 2015 00:54

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

DARPA Dad posted:

Coding horrors: Kickstarter edition https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1091981218/pythor-a-premier-web-programming-language

i'm the bad unfunny april fools joke

# ? Apr 2, 2015 01:15

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

I dunno man, if this is an April's Fools joke then he spent quite a while setting it up: https://github.com/football-fastball/pyThor

# ? Apr 2, 2015 01:31

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Yeah I interpreted it as a dude who's just slightly unhinged, there's no shortage of them in this industry.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 01:36

Space Kablooey: May 6, 2009

I thought that Javascript on the server was stupid, but I never would have imagined Python on the client (of sorts).

Suspicious Dish posted:

i'm the bad unfunny april fools joke

Admiral H. Curtiss posted:

I dunno man, if this is an April's Fools joke then he spent quite a while setting it up: https://github.com/football-fastball/pyThor

Poe's Law strikes again.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 02:51

TheresaJayne: Jul 1, 2011

Admiral H. Curtiss posted:

I dunno man, if this is an April's Fools joke then he spent quite a while setting it up: https://github.com/football-fastball/pyThor

Well he does say if you pledge you can look at the website ddstar.us

DOH!

# ? Apr 2, 2015 06:45

Hughlander: May 11, 2005

HardDisk posted:

I thought that Javascript on the server was stupid, but I never would have imagined Python on the client (of sorts).

Poe's Law strikes again.

A lot of games use Python on the client. Civ iv / v for example.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 15:00

Space Kablooey: May 6, 2009

I meant in web land.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 15:03

Soricidus: Oct 21, 2010; freedom-hating statist shill

I'd use it. It's a much nicer language than Javascript. Harder to minify, I guess.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 15:18

Munkeymon: Aug 14, 2003; Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.

JavaScript is gradually accumulating features that Python also leans on quite a bit, anyway. Just wait a decade or so and you can use them in production with a shim :v:

# ? Apr 2, 2015 16:00

Polio Vax Scene: Apr 5, 2009

Create your resources in Python, run them through a converter that turns them into Javascript.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 16:10

Pavlov: Oct 21, 2012; I've long been fascinated with how the alt-right develops elaborate and obscure dog whistles to try to communicate their meaning without having to say it out loud
Stepan Andreyevich Bandera being the most prominent example of that

If only browsers supported something that wasn't javascript. Maybe we could program in something good instead.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 16:40

Mogomra: Nov 5, 2005; simply having a wonderful time

Pavlov posted:

If only browsers supported something that wasn't javascript. Maybe we could program in something good instead.

Any Good Language can be Compiled Down to JavaScript�

# ? Apr 2, 2015 16:54

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# ? Jun 8, 2024 02:13

Zorro KingOfEngland: May 7, 2008

Mogomra posted:

Any Good Language can be Compiled Down to JavaScript�

I prefer "sufficiently advanced languages are indistinguishable from Javascript (to a compiler)"

# ? Apr 2, 2015 17:06

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