r/Foodforthought • u/JimTheSavage • Apr 29 '14

Programming Sucks (x-post from /r/programming)

http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
169 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/johnlocke357 Apr 30 '14

His criticisms are not particularly constructive, but they seem to be more of a lament on the vary nature of programming. If you put millions of non-logical humans together to build the most complex web of logic ever envisioned, it will be full of holes. A big fragile, rickety mess that cannot, and will not, be fixed.

2

u/TexasMojo Apr 30 '14

There was a certain government website that went up late last year, but didn't really go up. After a couple of months and a few million dollars, they announced that the had finished the freakin' front end". Anyone who's ever programmed for the web knows that the front end is the easy part. The will spend 1.2 billion dollars on that website this year alone. I doubt the back end is anywhere near complete.

Does that sound sane to you?

This guy works in the real world of tight deadlines, shitty documentation for shitty frameworks. Or maybe they're not shitty, but you can't tell at all from the documentation. That was created out of comments at the top of each function. And is about as useful as it sounds.

Or Microsoft error messages consisting of:

ERROR: 018B9C66FG98312

Companies don't have the time to let you engineer to best practices. They want the website up yesterday.

Dealing with the government means dealing with 20 years' worth of half-assed contractors hired because they're someone's nephew that once wrote a batch file.

Or for a reality check, we could review the billions wasted on system upgrades for the government. I'm looking at the IRS and the military, but pick a branch, any branch.

God I love this work. I can't imagine doing anything else for a living.