Always Learning wrote:
On Fri, 2011-09-16 at 01:41 +0800, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:
On 9/16/11, Always Learning centos@u61.u22.net wrote:
<snip>
It is surprising that some 'computer people' lack a logical insight into their own work. One 'expert' wrote a single Cobol IF statement spanning 10 and a bit pages. 60 printed coding lines per page. He thought that was 'great'. I shuddered and thought it was stupid.
Oh, *Ghu*. <shakes head> I left behind at several jobs CICS code that had in it PERFORM 1000-DUMMY-PARAGRAPH THROUGH 1000-DUMMY-PARAGRAPH EXIT WHILE <an entire while loop, that may actually have called another subroutine>, just to make up for COBOL's shortage of control structures (for/next, while). PL/1 was nicer, and when I got to C, I thought I'd gone to heaven....
I've seen code like you mention. A number of years ago, I was brought in to program. The place's code was all in perl, which my manager had written. He had most of his EE, and hadn't studied programming... and it showed. I rewrote 600 or 1000 lines of code that were straight line spaghetti into clean, modular stuff, and as I did it, he was clearly studying what I did (I know, because I saw he'd copied one brief date routine into a program he was working on).
Remember, even among those who studied, a) half of them were in the bottom of their class, and b) too many are True Believers in the latest programming (not the P word!) paradigm; y'know, recursion is the answer to *everything*, or OO, or....
At the same place, Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam), I was asked NOT to make my programmes user-friendly and to remove user-friendly features from my programmes because "If the users see them, they will ask us to put your user-friendly improvements in our programmes".
The applications I wrote carried data from one screen to the next screen and saved the worker having to re-enter the data. NVLS (the airport authority) staff wanted their old system retained - the user having to copy onto a piece of paper the essential data and type it in on the next screen. There was I thinking I had done a good job and the next minute I was told to programme like a moron.
And they want to *guarantee* that more errors will come in.
Sometimes well-paid contract work can make the contractor feel like a prostitute. Does one object to utter stupidity and walk-out or abandon one's principals and stay ?
I think I'd work my way up management... and/or look for another job.
mark "actually, did that"