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Programming Sucks - A Lighthearted View

posted by janrinok on Thursday May 01 2014, @01:52PM   Printer-friendly
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.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by SplawnDarts on Thursday May 01 2014, @10:54PM

    by SplawnDarts (3962) on Thursday May 01 2014, @10:54PM (#38672)

    Because it generates code like (taken from an example - maybe not optimally readable): // Dump the list to check the result
        for (list::const_iterator citer = mylist.begin();
              citer != mylist.end(); ++citer)
        {
            cout (*citer).m_iData endl;
        }

    Instead of (python):

    for item in list:
          print(item)

  • (Score: 1) by SplawnDarts on Thursday May 01 2014, @11:01PM

    by SplawnDarts (3962) on Thursday May 01 2014, @11:01PM (#38677)

    OK, HTML formatting mangled that (my bad for not checking)

    // Dump the list to check the result
      for (list<MyData>::const_iterator citer = mylist.begin();
         citer != mylist.end(); ++citer)
      {
        cout << (*citer).m_iData << endl;
      }

    vs (python)

    for item in list:
       print(item)

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 02 2014, @06:17PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday May 02 2014, @06:17PM (#39009) Journal

      In C++11, you can write

      for (auto& item: mylist)
        std::cout << item << '\n';

      Not that much more complicated than your Python variant, is it? But note that (both in C++11 and in Python) this sort of loop needs specific language support, while the STL was written are pure library for C++ (and only afterward integrated into the C++ standard library). You cannot add new for loop syntax using a library.

      Anyway, your examples are not equivalent: The equivalent code in C++89 to your Python code would be cout . I wonder if you intentionally made the C++ code do something more complex to increase the perceived complexity of C++ (also your use of (*citer).m_iData instead of the equivalent but simpler citer->m_iData hints in that direction).

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 02 2014, @06:19PM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday May 02 2014, @06:19PM (#39011) Journal

        Damn, should have been preview instead of submit ...

        Of course the corresponding C++89 line would be

          std::cout << *citer << '\n';

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.