On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 03:54:21PM +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote: [...] > In big corporations you spend more time taking care of existing > projects in big teams, than developing stuff from scratch. > > In these type of environments you learn to appreciate the verbosity > of certain programming languages, and keep away from cute hacks.
I have to say, this is very true. When I first got my current job, I was appalled at the verbosity of the C code that I had to work with. C code!! Not Java or any of that stuff. My manager told me to try to conform to the (very verbose) style of the code. So I thought, well they're paying me to do this, so I'll shut up and cope. After a few years, I started to like the verbosity (which is saying a lot from a person like me -- I used to code with 2-space indents), because it makes it so darned easy to read, to search, and to spot stupid bugs. Identifier names are predictable, so you could just guess the correct name and you'd be right most of the time. Makes it easy to search for identifier usage in the ~2 million line codebase, because the predictable pattern excludes (almost) all false positives. However: > Specially when you take into consideration the quality of work that > many programming drones are capable of. [...] Yeah, even the verbosity / consistent style of the code didn't prevent people from doing stupid things with the code. Utterly stupid things. My favorite example is a particular case of checking for IPv6 subnets by converting the subnet and IP address to strings and then using string prefix comparison. Another example is a bunch of static functions with identical names and identical contents, copy-n-pasted across like 30 modules (or worse, some copies are imperfect buggy versions). It makes you wonder if the guy who wrote it even understands what code factorization means. Or "bug fixes" that consists of a whole bunch of useless redundant code to "fix" a problem, that adds all sorts of spurious buggy corner cases to the code and *doesn't actually address the cause of the bug at all*. It boggles the mind how something like that made it through code review. The saddest thing is that people are paying big bucks for this kind of "enterprise" code. It's one of those things that make me never want to pay for *any* kind of software... why waste the money when you can download the OSS version for free? Yeah a lot of OSS code is crap, but it's not like it's any worse than the crap you pay for. Sigh. T -- Маленькие детки - маленькие бедки.
