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Programming Sucks - A Lighthearted View

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

Nerdfest writes:

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.

• One of the best prose styles in ages One of the best prose styles in ages (Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:33PM

  by c0lo (156) on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:33PM (#38499) Journal

  One of the best prose styles I read in ages on the Internet. Flowing smooth, has sort of a rhythm of its own and is punctuated with delicious surrealist imagery:

  ... You have not yet spent so much of your life reading code that you begin to talk in it. The human brain isn't particularly good at basic logic and now there's a whole career in doing nothing but really, really complex logic. Vast chains of abstract conditions and requirements have to be picked through to discover things like missing commas. Doing this all day leaves you in a state of mild aphasia as you look at people's faces while they're speaking and you don't know they've finished because there's no semicolon. You immerse yourself in a world of total meaninglessness where all that matters is a little series of numbers went into a giant labyrinth of symbols and a different series of numbers or a picture of a kitten came out the other end.
  ...
  Eventually every programmer wakes up and before they're fully conscious they see their whole world and every relationship in it as chunks of code, and they trade stories about it as if sleepiness triggering acid trips is a normal thing that happens to people. This is a world where people eschew sex to write a programming language for orangutans. All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.

  --
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+2
  Interesting=2, Total=2
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		4

• Re:One of the best prose styles in ages (Score: 3) by Nerdfest on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:48PM

  by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:48PM (#38512)

  I was a big fan of :

  " So no, I'm not required to be able to lift objects weighing up to fifty pounds. I traded that for the opportunity to trim Satan's pubic hair while he dines out of my open skull so a few bits of the internet will continue to work for a few more days."

  I would have been proud to have written it.

  Parent