An outrageous, insightful, and sadly accurate commentary on programming. I found this an extremely entertaining read and agree with most of it. It doesn't offer solutions, but certainly highlights a lot of the problems.
"Double you tee eff?" you say, and start hunting for the problem. You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for "Infinity" when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn't, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler. Then he decided he wasn't going to tell anyone that this was an error, because he's a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can't even find the cat.
Personally, I think things will only get better (including salaries) when software development is treated like other engineering disciplines.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:16PM
when software development is treated like other engineering disciplines. No one will pay engineers' salaries to fuckwit morons who can't even hack pointer arithmetic without causing a segfault.
Coders are not worth the combined cash value of their bodily fluids.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:39PM
Your bridge collapsed because Bob from Accounting set it up in a place where there's no support under one of the towers, Nigerian saboteurs drilled out half the rivets, and then a horde of bored children decided to see what happens when you drive a billion cars over it simultaneously? Wow, you pathetic wanker.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:45PM
Actually bridges have collapsed because some idiots thought it was a good idea to do collective swinging on them ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Funny) by JeanCroix on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:50PM
...if they had to build things to be deployed by idiots and withstand forces unconstrained by physics or logic.
Hi. I design things for the military.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fishybell on Thursday May 01 2014, @04:31PM
Having written software for military training devices, yes: this; times a million.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @07:21AM
I worked with truck drivers...
These guys have LOTS of free time to think up new inventive ways to fuck something up. Then try it on their mandatory 8 hour 'sleep'.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday May 01 2014, @03:23PM
" if they had to build things to be deployed by idiots"
I think you're giving a bit too much credit to imported construction workers if you think they're not idiots...