Idiotic programming style edicts
in [General Programming]
|
Prev: System Calls
Next: Warning to newbies
From: spinoza1111 on 21 Mar 2010 06:33 On Mar 21, 3:40 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...(a)see.sig.invalid> wrote: > jmfbahciv wrote: > >spinoza1111wrote: > >> On Mar 18, 9:19 pm, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv(a)aol> wrote: > > <snip> > > >>> Are you nuts? > > He can't be, because he says he isn't, and he should know, right? Actually, there's a possibility here of mass psychosis based on the breakdown of the lower class myth about programming, eg., that it provides long term economic security and that "good people" are rewarded. In this context I'd very well appear to be crazy if actually sane if you use statistical tests. The fact is that crazy people don't write coherently (esp. traditional coherent verse). Your inablity to read is merely an artifact of a poor education. > > >> No, just that rarity: a competent programmer (the best one in this > >> newsgroup, probably) > > > Now I know you have a 99% reality filter. > > >> who's literate. > > > Wrong. there are more capable people in a.f.c. > > There are more capable people in > alt.2eggs.sausage.beans.tomatoes.2toast.largetea.cheerslove > > -- > Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk> > Email: -http://www. +rjh@ > "Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999 > Sig line vacant - apply within
From: spinoza1111 on 21 Mar 2010 06:57 On Mar 21, 2:17 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...(a)seebs.net> wrote: > On 2010-03-20, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv(a)aol> wrote: > > >spinoza1111wrote: > >> Beautiful Mind" Nash with C in 1991, I abandoned it as my code > >> addressed GUI platforms as inadequate. I've debugged Fortran compilers > >> with no source, > > How did you cause the compiler to compile if you had no FORTRAN code > > to feed it? > > He probably means "no source for the compiler". Check out the big brain on peter! Yes. IBM delivered the compiler to Roosevelt University as a two foot card deck and approximately 2000 cards, since Roosevelt had no tape units on rental. > > >> Peter Seebach, although another Apress author who's written some sort > >> of scripting book, the quality of which is unknown to me, has no > >> academic preparation in computer science > > Oh, that's why he's so good. > > Actually, I'd probably be better if I'd studied CS. It just didn't occur > to me. Yes, you might be minimally competent. Here's the charge sheet as of today (22 March): 1. "The heap is a DOS term" 2. One line and off by one strlen 3. Out of order test of an index and its use around a logical And after "two months work" 4. Case statements in pseudo root that fall through incorrectly to an error default block after "two months work" 5. Expectation of a charity for your mistakes that you have not extended to Herb or me > > >>and claims he has a learning > >> disorder. > > Two, actually! I have very noticeable clinical ADHD, and I'm also autistic. > These are... Well, they're certainly disadvantages for school. They're not > awful for actually learning how things work. But you haven't learned how things work. You've been mollycoddled because you are white and middle class. > > >> His "day job" by his own admission, is a typically factored > >> and rationalized clerical paraprogramming job in which he finds and > >> reports compiler bugs, perhaps writing a lot of scripts. > > This is almost certainly a lie, but it's hard to tell. Certainly, he's > been told what I actually do several times. > > Hint #1: I don't "find" compiler bugs, I just take other people's bugs > and forward them. On the other hand, proving that something is a compiler > bug is not the most trivial task. Yes, I agree. However, as the compiler specialist at Bell Northern Research, I had to not only prove that events were compiler bugs, I also had to disprove this proposition wrt other events. I also had to write new compilers. I also had to fix old compilers. And, I maintained the toolset for compiler installation. It may be that things are more complex on your job. Nonetheless, at this point, finding bugs and writing scripts seems to me to be paraprogramming. > Hint #2: I also program in a couple of languages, including C. Yes, but this seems to be off the books. I do not see where currently or in the past you've been actually trusted to write anything either important internally or released externally. I concede that such tasks are today factored among many people, but are you a part of any such effort? > > http://github.com/wrpseudo/pseudo > > Most recent work: I've been adding chroot(2) emulation. I have it > Nearly Working -- I can run a build of ~184 various packages under it, > but filesystem assembly for larger filesystems is failing in some > unexplained way. You might want to check ALL logical And and ALL logical Or statements in your code, for Ersek Laszlo has discovered one in which an index is tested for use after it is used, an error which an experienced C programmer would not make (unlike a typo in the use of =, sweetheart). Then, you need to check all your switch blocks because in at least two cases valid possibilities fall down to default, an error which an experienced C programmer would not make, or one which would be eradicated after "two months" work (like a typo in the use of =, honey bunny). It seems that you decided to go off and do a chroot with minimal buy in from whoever you are working for. Nothing wrong with that. At Princeton, I decided to write a parser generator in Rexx, and I gave a paper about it. My management didn't know that any such tool was needed but they okayed it after the fact. At IBM, Mike Cowlishaw developed the Rexx language on his own initiative, but not on work time. A lot of interesting projects happen this way, but I've looked over your code, and I suspect that because, as you admit, you make trivial mistakes in the small, you are here inappropriately to get a very bad job fixed by stealing the intellectual production of others. > > (And yes, pseudo is essentially a one-man project, excluding code > reviews. I think there's some file-descriptor magic that got reworked > while I was on vacation once.) OK, so all the boners I find are yours. You are an honest person, I will say that for you. > > >> He's also, as we see above, a very ignorant and incurious person. > > Seebs?!!! You must have a reading challengement. > > I have no clue where he gets most of this stuff. He amuses me a lot, > and honestly, I'd just play around with him and explore the madness, but: > > 1. Not everyone is on Usenet purely for recreation. > 2. Not everyone finds the madness of kooks amusing. > > I think it's not so much that he has trouble reading, as that he doesn't > *think* about what he reads. Thus, even though he'd already heard that I > had a degree, when I mentioned not having finished high school, he asserted > that I had "failed". Not the most reasonable inference! But you did. You failed to get a high school diploma, and you failed trigonometry because they didn't present it "your" way as derivable from calculus. News flash: you might think I'm crazy, but one attribute of the truly nuts is the claim that they have special, unique, wisdom and talents that the cold cruel world doesn't see. In academia, things are presented in a certain way so that the product of academia is certifiable, not only as knowing, but also as having the ability to further its collective goals. I'm afraid that for their own selfish reasons, however, corporations actively discourage collegiality because it is a form of solidarity and justice, and today, corporations have been given a divine right to make money. One way is fitting autodidacts and people with severe personality and cognitive disorders into a deviant structure in such a way that those people can make some sort of contribution and be grateful for a shot. In programming, the result is forty year old men with mindsets of adolescents because they "know" some technology and are also willing to destroy people with different styles, even when those people are more normal. They are often fat and substance abusing. > > -s > -- > Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...(a)seebs.nethttp://www.seebs.net/log/<-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictureshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
From: Charlie Gibbs on 22 Mar 2010 13:51 In article <He-dnW3mZ6obUDjWnZ2dnUVZ8l1i4p2d(a)bt.com>, rjh(a)see.sig.invalid (Richard Heathfield) writes: > jmfbahciv wrote: > >> spinoza1111 wrote: >> >>> On Mar 18, 9:19 pm, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv(a)aol> wrote: >>> ><snip> >>> >>>> Are you nuts? > > He can't be, because he says he isn't, and he should know, right? > >>> No, just that rarity: a competent programmer (the best one in this >>> newsgroup, probably) >> >> Now I know you have a 99% reality filter. >> >>> who's literate. >> >> Wrong. there are more capable people in a.f.c. > > There are more capable people in > alt.2eggs.sausage.beans.tomatoes.2toast.largetea.cheerslove Have you got anything without Spam in it? -- /~\ cgibbs(a)kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs) \ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way. X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855. / \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!
From: StevePratt on 22 Mar 2010 13:34
idiot programming edict ... mid 1980s ... some PHB read about "structured programming" and stated that no one was to use GO TO in COBOL programs. I get handed a program to debug - it seems that it no longer works - and they give it to me just to have a "new set of eyes." I barely glanced at the house keeping routines... PERFORM INIT_READ, PERFORM REPORT_HEADING, and so on. I do spend a long time following the code referenced by PERFORM MAIN_LINE. But nothing makes sense. What I am looking at is NOT what the program is doing... So I finally have to put some displays in the code and follow along ... Turns out that because they can no longer use GO TO, some one replaced the GO TO INIT_READ with a PERFORM, but control NEVER CAME BACK. sheesh! |