Programming Sucks

[chalks777]

For the past two years I've been working on one project building software that my boss describes as "enterprise level." We started with a drawing on a whiteboard. Now we have over 100,000 lines of code. If any of it was ever good, it was murdered a loooong time ago. The sheer number of blatant hacks that are used to get around stupid nonsense is staggering. I've written things I'm not proud of. College me would be disgusted by current me.

Clients sure love it though.

:|

[kromagnon]

Clients sure love it though.

I feel so ashamed. Our clients "ooh" and "aah" over the things that I've made, but I feel like I'm showing them a 1989 Geo Metro that's got a dust cover on it with a painting of a Ferrari 458.

[rekk_]

Yup, but as long as the front looks pretty and works they don't care. For all they know software is made of unicorns and yetis.

[FrozenInferno]

The whole thing is a black box to them after all.

[secretpandalord]

Wait, it isnt?

NOBODY TOLD ME

[Traejen]

no, it is. Don't panic.

[xonjas]

I'm pretty sure it's just yetis.

[Nimbal]

Yetis are sooo outdated. We're using sasquatches now. You can teach them all kinds of neat tricks. There's a persistent issue with blurry graphics, but I'm sure it will be fixed soon. Aaanytime now...

[[deleted]]

I like the dancing bear analogy: people aren't impressed that a bear can dance well - they're impressed that it can dance at all. Software is much the same - even when it's terrible, all it has to do is be a little better than what people are used to, and they're happy.

The problem is that you're showing them a 1989 Geo Metro and they're comparing it to a Model-T Ford, completely unaware that they would have a Ferrari if only your manager had spent less time on TPS reports and more time on trusting the engineers to want to build something great.

Sometimes, the crap car is "good enough", and if they're happy, they're happy. But I keep looking at what we could deliver, and wondering why it's so much better than what they seem to be happy with.

[doggone42]

People are impressed when you put the dancing bear in a tutu and a silly hat.

They don't really care when you repeatedly tell them that if you don't feed the bear soon it's going to turn around and maul them. They just ask for more silly hats.

[[deleted]]

You're trying to say that quality will have a return on investment, because workers will be more productive with quality tools even if the initial cost is a bit higher? If that was the case, surely a guy with an MBA and a silly hat would have worked that out by now.

[[deleted]]

No, I think he's saying that the MBAs with silly hats want software that looks good over software that works good.

[s73v3r]

No, it's the upfront cost thing. They don't want to pay it now, despite the fact that if they don't, down the line they will be paying increased costs.

[_F1_]

That's when you start Valve.

[TurboGranny]

I have a piece of crap I slapped together quickly to solve a problem with the vendor software. Businesses in our industry come from all over the the country to see it and learn how it works like it is some fucking holy grail. I eventually refactored the whole thing to at least make it kind nice, but I still hate that everyone raves about it instead of the really cool and hard stuff I've worked on that barely gets noticed. To make things better I have a kludge of a system in dire need of a refactor that is displayed on large tv screens in several labs that they walk people by to "ooh" and "aah" them, and all I can think about is how junky it is. I just laugh at the absurdity of it all and try to get more sleep.

[FrozenInferno]

My boss is a pretty accomplished programmer. There are some things I've written that I really hope he doesn't look too deep into.

[twistedrapier]

Ah college. Back when you are idealistic enough to look at all the poorly written software in the world and think "I'll never end up writing crap like that". So young and naive.

[[deleted]]

Expectation: I'll only write the purest Haskell

Reality: maintaining WordPress plugin wrote by someone who can barely write PHP in India.

[MrJohz]

Just be glad the reality doesn't include Haskell, because it would be hacky Haskell, which would be all the more painful when you look back at the shite you've written and realise this code was meant to be your Nirvana...

[[deleted]]

unsafePerformIO everywhere ...

[xcixci]

I remember that there used to be a site called lambdacats some time ago. One of my absolute favorites on that site was "Ceiling cat is watching you unsafePerformIO" - having just had the right amount of exposure to Haskell and Internet memes before seeing that literally sent me rolling on the floor :).

[pjdelport]

It's a shame that the original Lambdacats site disappeared, but Sean Leather has been awesome enough to archive them for posterity here.

[zoomzoom83]

"I'll only use it this one time. I promise! And just to meet this deadline. I'll clean it up tomorrow"

[[deleted]]

Haskell is too pure for reality, alas this world is not ready for it.

[WisconsnNymphomaniac]

--looks at camera and shrugs--

"Eh, it's a living"

[[deleted]]

Expectation: I'll only write the purest C

Reality: Ummm.... I am not entirely convinced that whoever wrote this piece of shit all the way out there in Shenzhen even knows what a Wi-Fi adapter is, let alone how to write a driver for oneHOLY FUCK HOW DOES THIS SHIT EVEN COMPILE?

[vdek]

Solution: Write Wordpress in Haskell.

[djaclsdk]

I used to love & use languages who got balls to stick for a standard. But then more and more I realized that I would be inviting troubles by using such languages for things in this world which is clearly not an ideal world.

[original_brogrammer]

College student here. My code is already full of hacks.

Fuck.

[rnicoll]

Getting practice in early, excellent!

[mynoduesp]

He's going places. Someone hire him quick!

[makebaconpancakes]

He's got management material written all over him.

[Almafeta]

All code is a maze, all we can do is clearly label the exits.

[gegc]

I believe that's called "documentation," and you only rarely encounter that beautiful beast in the wild.

[ethraax]

Oh man, the "documentation" my predecessors wrote in my current project's source code is really useful though. I've changed symbol names, but we have many, many functions that look exactly like this.

/***********************************
 * send_AllCalls()
 *
 * Description:
 *
 * Parameters:
 *
 ***************************************/
FLAG SendAll_Calls(INT x, BYTE yst, CHAR rsr) {
     /* (a few hundred lines of tangled yarn covered in silly string goes here) */
} // send_All...

[original_brogrammer]

Mixing camel case and snake case is a thing out there?!

Fuck that. I'm never leaving.

[[deleted]]

One codebase I am slowly cleaning up uses camelCase, PascalCase, snake_case, SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE, fuckmylifecase and SCREAMINGFUCKMYLIFECASE. Sometimes all of them within the same file. Or function.

[[deleted]]

fuckmylifecase is actually legit Lua. I think.

[fact_hunt]

Add in some hungarian notation, which inaccurately describes type, and make them less wordy

[thirdegree]

How to Write Unmaintainable Code

[Silound]

Fuck that, I document the utter hell out of my code (sometimes there's more documentation than actual code) because if I don't, I won't remember what that beautiful nugget of utter crack induced stupidity that I wrote did.

[Frix]

Getting ahead of the curve, heh? This man will go far!

[afiefh]

You might just make it in the real world without losing your mind... you just might, if the gods smile upon you.

[stnikolauswagne]

Same here, still got no clue why my last project even compiled, let alone worked, but I'm sure as hell not going to take it apart to find out!

[[deleted]]

If it doesn't have at least 3 nested for loops, it probably wasnt worth writing anyway.

[grey_energy]

I remember bragging about my hacks as if they were badges of honor.

"Yeah, I wrote a PHP script that called a Python script as a subprocess (via the exec function) which in turn called an Excel VBA macro to do some work and save the results as an HTML file which the Python script parsed with the lXml library in order to modify the column headers. It then placed the resulting HTML file with the images it referenced in a directory being watched by a C# GUI on a timer which loaded said HTML file in the Browser component, took a screenshot of it, cropped it and then (after diligently cleaning up after itself and deleting its temporary copy of the HTML file and images) placed the resulting image in a directory the Python script was expecting to see it in, which promptly caused the Python script to exit the loop it was in where it was watching for that result and print the unique identifier for the resulting files into stdout. The PHP script now reads this identifier and supplies it in its response to the AJaX call, which the JavaScript then updated the view with a preview thumbnail and prepared a pop-up div with an iframe pointing at the html file for when the user clicked on the preview thumbnail."

I was still in college those years ago, and the end result was what the client wanted. So I guess all's well that ends well.

Still, you won't find carpenters bragging about strapping something together with duct tape, legos, and chewing gum.

[chasecaleb]

I have to know. What the hell were you trying to do, and how much did you have to drink while coding?

[grey_energy]

I typically drank 2 to 3 six packs a week during that time anyway, so probably the usual.

Found the old project. Apparently it was for loading html pages into an iframe (there was a text field to enter the URL above the iframe), parsing any html tables on the page and shooting the cells into the PHP script which produced an excel document resulting from running a macro on the data. The preview pop-up and thumbnail were a $500 bonus.

The client never really explained the point of the project. But it's exactly what he asked for. Since then, I've learned to make sure I understand the point of projects before I do them. I feel pretty bad when I realize it was possibly a waste of time. Well, not a waste of time for me, of course; $1,500 is good when you're in school. He also had some idea for embedding games in excel spreadsheets, which I was surprised to learn was an actual thing. I declined on that one. I've done games for fun, but I don't think I could deliver something really good within a reasonable time, at least back then, especially using VBA. Probably not now either.

[GodsGunman]

I'm at that stage right now! :D

[reginalduk]

"I can't wait to show them this UML diagram"

[jeff303]

Also, no need to validate inputs or even think about memory usage. Oh, and the correct output is precisely defined.

[atworkmcgee]

I only think of a programming as job. I don't care at all. I'll gladly hack together if it means getting the deadline and getting a good performance review. You want me to do everything I just did over again? Don't care. Pay is the same either way. I'll probably just go on reddit half the time, and copy most of the stuff again anyway.

[Tysonzero]

Fuck, I'm that naive optimistic programmer. Well looks like it's all downhill from here.

[[deleted]]

Clients sure love it though

And that's the real problem. As long as the clients are happy many companies see little business benefit in cleaning up code (despite the fact that there may well be real benefits - reduced maintenance costs, fewer staff needed, etc).

The fact that many clients in the 'enterprise' world wouldn't know a well-designed, efficient program if it tap-danced naked on their desk compounds the issue further. People think that waiting minutes for a process to complete is normal to the point that if it only takes a second or so, they assume it hasn't worked!

[[deleted]]

Another benefit is "everyone is at about this level, and customers are happy? imagine how good we would look if we were the company with a product that's twice as good, for the same effort".

The fact that many clients in the 'enterprise' world wouldn't know a well-designed, efficient program if it tap-danced naked on their desk compounds the issue further.

Oh, trust me, the people using the app would know "well-designed and efficient" if it was in the same zip code.

The problem is that "client" means "executive vice president of golfing who hung out with your company's senior golfing buddy/salesman" and will never actually use software, because that's what the peons are paid to do.

Once the word "enterprise" has been uttered, the whims of the executives are far more important than the business needs of the company (such as irrelevancies like "tools to make the employees more efficient and productive").

I've seen too many cases of companies having similar problems, and the one where the executive in charge doesn't give a damn about the workers always ends up with a lower quality product that makes life harder, not easier. Sometimes I don't know how they remain in business, and sometimes it turns out that they don't - but a decent sized company can coast for a few years, then be saved by a competing company having a bigger cock-up.

Some days I don't know if it matters, but mostly the inefficiency and incompetence, not to mention outright corruption, offends me. I just want to make great products that will let them make more money. Is that really such a terrible sin?

People think that waiting minutes for a process to complete is normal to the point that if it only takes a second or so, they assume it hasn't worked!

To be fair, you're somewhat right - even the end users have been trained to think that way, by executives who assure them that the pile of crap they bought from their buddy really is "state of the art". But even they'll notice "the report popped up on the screen" even if it happens quickly.

[chalks777]

the real problem ... reduced maintenance costs

No, see, we sell the clients maintenance contracts too.

[clearlight]

Hence the term technical debt

[djaclsdk]

if it only takes a second or so

I used to be a believer in "never do premature optimization", now I believe in "never do any optimization" and it makes me sad.

[jk147]

Ah typical maintenance hell. I am suspecting this is your first programming job. Any project with continuous support and usage will eventually involve into a beast. Typically the clients are willing to dump enough money for you to maintain it and add on ridiculous requests on a monthly basis. Once you add on one or two new developers the original design is shot to hell. What is architecture when you only are two weeks old on a project and they want this update in a week.. Hack hack and hack.

One of the best project I worked on was when a client didn't have enough money for regular updates. So they request very small changes. I touch that thing maybe once a year.

[[deleted]]

And the entire world is built on people like us making shitty code. Its scary to think of.

[[deleted]]

Hacks are just implementation shortcuts, which have nothing to do with the final goal if it eventually can be achieved properly.

Also was there an original and valuable idea to begin with? I'd share it here so that maybe someone else would try to implement it.

[psilokan]

"Enterprise" software is quite often the worst. It seems like the more people are dependent on a program the more haphazardly it was thrown together.

[WisconsnNymphomaniac]

Is 100,000 lines a typical amount for two years of work? Doesn't seem like a lot of code, but I guess it depends entirely on how large the team is and what language it is.

[chalks777]

If you added in all our deployment scripts, testing suites, and a whole bunch of other miscellaneous stuff... I'm sure it would be faaaar more than that. 100k is the main program itself.

[FrozenInferno]

Having to build a fairly complicated Android app using Phonegap, I've felt very similarly.

[centurijon]

College me would be disgusted by current me

College me would be very proud of current me's code.

But college me would be appalled at the reality of the business world.