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posted by janrinok on Thursday May 01 2014, @01:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the relax-its-a-holiday dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by tibman on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:26PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:26PM (#38497)

    The article is not about programming sucking. It's about the environment and team a software engineer works within. Crazy business requirements. Inescapable modals to gather information that you KNOW customers don't know and are just going to fill with garbage. Deadlines pulled out of thin-air. Paying for the previous guy's project architecture experiments. Some sort of WaterScrumFall hybrid because someone read the preface of a team management book. All the things around writing the code.

    The whole coders vs programmers vs software engineers is just a "no true Scotsman" argument : )

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  • (Score: 1) by Noldir on Saturday May 03 2014, @03:54PM

    by Noldir (1216) on Saturday May 03 2014, @03:54PM (#39261)

    Ah yes, the lovely project management method of scrummerfall. I hope it doesn't catch on too much, all the agility of scrum wrapped in hard deadlines and red tape..