On Friday, 20 April 2012 at 04:40:56 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
But I suppose my experience has been colored by the trauma of
working
with an over-engineered C++ system that only one guy
understands,
resulting in people who came after him rewriting their own
versions of
code that they didn't dare reuse 'cos they didn't understand it,
eventually ending up in a patch-upon-bandaid-upon-patch
codebase with
umpteen ways of doing the same thing that *nobody* understands,
not even
the original guy.
One example. The system had this elaborate database abstraction
class
hierarchy that could do wonders: automatically populate data
structures,
automatically ensure data consistency, periodically do
self-maintenance,
replicate itself and sync with backup servers, etc., -- if we
only knew
how to use it. Problem is, only the guy who wrote it knew
which obscure
class objects to instantiate to make the thing sing to our
tune, so
somebody got frustrated and wrote what is essentially a wrapper
function
that takes a raw SQL string and executes it, thus bypassing the
entire
beautiful database abstraction code completely. Since everybody
else
didn't understand the original code either, they started using
this SQL
bypass function everywhere... only to discover that the system
broke in
subtle ways when you didn't go through its beautifully
over-engineered
abstractions. So more and more dirty hacks were introduced that
piled on
top of each other like festering infected bandages that fail to
address
the real wound underneath.
Oh yeah, I've seen that story too in a couple of other places.
C++ seems to make exceptionnally easy for "mad coders" to screw
up a whole system with overengineered pieces of crap. One of my
colleagues spent more than a year rewriting a system that turned
into a black box that nobody could maintain.
My opinion is, when a team works in this language, code reviews
should be an obligation, else there is always a guy like that,
who has his genius idea that nobody else understands and puts his
crap all over the place. Basically, the only piece of C++
software I've seen that never became a huge piece of steaming
crap was a system that was systematically code reviewed by the
main software architect and a couple of highly skilled engineers.
I suspect D is not much better on this topic, it's possible to
write extremely complex code with it too. Actually, it's possible
to write complex and unmaintaineble stuff in any language (even
in Python), but I believe the more complex the language, the
easier it is to screw things up and the more important code
reviews are.
