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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: 2) by Reziac on Friday May 02 2014, @02:57AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Friday May 02 2014, @02:57AM (#38730) Homepage

    I think that's generally true of any industry where one side of the table gets to say what they want and how they want it, and the other side of the table is tasked with implementing it but lacks authority to change what doesn't work.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
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