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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:39PM (#38502)
    Engineers would be a lot less smug about their superiority over programmers if they had to build things to be deployed by idiots and withstand forces unconstrained by physics or logic.

    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.
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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:45PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:45PM (#38508) Journal

    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

    by JeanCroix (573) on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:50PM (#38513)

    ...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

      by fishybell (3156) on Thursday May 01 2014, @04:31PM (#38545)

      Having written software for military training devices, yes: this; times a million.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @07:21AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @07:21AM (#38783)

      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

    by Dunbal (3515) on Thursday May 01 2014, @03:23PM (#38528)

    " 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...