Nobody Hates Software More Than Software Developers

I didn't find the rest of the article that interesting, but he definitely nailed his first point.

It's not so much bad programming, it's more a case of why? Why do I want to install something that by default will chew up memory by running in the background (and default to launch on startup), that I will never use, because I have so many better tools for the job.

I guess the argument is that it's useful for non power-users... Umm sure. How many of you have been asked to fix something on a relative or friends windows box only to find it grindingly slow because of all the run-time resident crap running on it? Like 10 things in the system tray? Update notifications launching one after another on boot? My first task is usually removing all of this stuff they NEVER use before even tackling the real problem they're having.

``The Windows 3.1 Guru''

1) That guy who knew too much about Windows 3.1 internals and never thought this newfangled "Windows for Workgroups" or "95" would never take off. Thank you, sir. Treating obaque structures for the unsigned chars they are has never posed a problem for me. All the documentation I needed was in those 4 pages of macros you left me (completely unnecessary, given the clarity of their octal values, btw) Indeed, 10 years later, the low nibble of the AL register held an integer index into your very own "stash area" just below the PSP (task_struct for linux weenies) where you kept all the open file handles. Clever of you, reusing every bit of the process memory, specially the unused parts of the MS DOS header format. (long story about this destructive log-rotate elided)

Your share custody of this award with Mr. EE.

2) Mr. Electrical Engineer, how can I forget you? We all know it's all signals and gates down there, so, yeah, it was refreshing to see them again! I can't believe you rolled your own signal-driven layer on top of the Win32 message system. The ordering system couldn't have been done any other way. Looking at your code put a bar over my head, sir, you have asserted me. And to be honest, Visual C++ needed your linguistic extensions; we all know, code runs faster when it looks more and more like Fortran.

Huh... I generally don't enjoy Jeff's column, but this is the first one where I was nodding my head the whole time. In fact, I had even copied the above quote from the article just to comment on it, but in affirmative agreement. To give some context, I'm on a team that is about to ship a very, very large project, and I have to say that I honestly believe my team's part to be the worst bit of it, and my own contribution to be the worst part of my team's code.

Well, maybe not really...but I can't shake this feeling every time I go in to work.

Here's why I think Jeff is right: Software, done well, is like magic. You don't see the arrays and pointers, you don't see that it was programed with objects and/or functions. You see an interface, you click some buttons, you type some words, and BAM! You get exactly what you want. At least, that's the user experience. If, however, you're the one writing the code that makes the magic work, then you know what's going on under the covers. You see the arrays and pointers and objects and functions. The magic is dead. The code is just a repulsive, heaping pile of bits with no special properties whatsoever.

If you tell me that your code is not the worst code you've seen recently for X, Y, and Z reasons-that-only-make-sense-to-a-programmer, then you've missed the point entirely.

I imagine the Wizard of Oz might have looked at his contraption and thought to himself "This is the worst hunk-a-junk illusion I've ever seen."