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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#421

Post by freetanga »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #130
hleszek wrote: post #126

When I started at my first company, they had a very complex VB application running on dozens of customers around the country, each having some particular needs of course. There was a LOT of global variables (seemingly random 4 uppercase letters) controlling everything. At some point, the application had some bugs which were not appearing when the application was run in debug mode in Visual Studio. The solution was ob…

This is amazing. I can so well imagine a bright young hire joining that team, helpfully offering to "setup this thing called git" only to be laughed out of the meeting by all the "senior" staff.

Software Configuration Management has existed as a discipline and with proper tooling for at least 50 years. Mainframe and VAX machines had tooling in the early 80s.

For VB Sourcesafe was the go to tool if memory serves.

This is not a case of new vs old, rather incompetence vs competence.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#422

Post by danogentili »

grishka wrote: post #237

The worst codebase I've ever worked on was the Telegram client for Android. I mean just look at this file, it's so huge GitHub gives up rendering it: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/master/TMessagesProj/... Or this one, it implements EVERYTHING for rendering and interacting with a message in a single class, all non-service message types, all drawn manually on a canvas "for performance", and all input processed…

This dude has absolutely no right to say anything about the quality of the source code of the android app, because:

1) His libtgvoip code, previously used for audio calls, is the worst code I have ever had the displesaure of touching, it caused all kinds of issues ranging from instability to segfaults, and thankfully it was completely replaced by webrtc.

2) The android app is literally the smoothest and most responsive android app I've ever used.

Grishka, please stop being so salty. VoIP is hard to do right, but not impossibly so. VoIP being hard is still not an excuse for writing garbage C/C++ code (and I don't mean to offend personally here, but the code was really a mess, please stick to Java development on your own personal projects).

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#423

Post by danogentili »

nar001 wrote: post #310
grishka wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BTW, would you mind sharing how you got that job? I started working with Pavel Durov in 2011 on the VKontakte Android app, after winning several of his developer contests, and it all just went from there. I was the last one of the "old" team to transfer to Telegram. My main job was actually the libtgvoip[1] library and its integration into the Android app (the other platforms were done by their corresponding devs).…

Why did the call fail? What failed with your implementation/the code?

Grishka wrote very low quality code (an extremely buggy and segfaulty mess of C and C++), combined with little testing in not-so-edge case network conditions.

I managed to improve the situation after weeks of refactoring and testing for my library, and thankfully now it was completely replaced by webrtc.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#424

Post by actionfromafar »

medstrom wrote: post #355
treflop wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if I agree that it’s unnatural. It only takes doing index73.php and index_old3.php for a few months and then eventually screwing up (unless you’re perfect) to realize how dumb putting numbers and _old4 at the end of names is. Then at that point, you naturally go look if there’s a better way.

Yes, so you invent CVS, not git.

You invent VMS versioned files, and RCS. :)

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#425

Post by protomolecule »

inkyoto wrote: post #361
chris_wot wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

git didn't win because of GitHub. Sure, GitHub helped a lot. But actually, it's because its a DVCS, and it does branching and merging way better than anything I've seen so far. You can thank BitKeeper for all of this, and Andrew Tridgwell for forcing Linus Torvalds into creating git.

Yes, git has solved a big problem with version control: it has made transactional atomic changesets (commits in the git parlance) mainstream. A git repository is a tree of atomic changesets that group changes into meaningful chunks as opposed to a versioned tree of files where changes to each file are harder to trace back to the intent, i.e. whether or not they are related. Atomic commits can also easily be moved aro…

> it has made transactional atomic changesets (commits in the git parlance) mainstream

Nope. Subversion made them mainstream:

"An svn commit operation publishes changes to any number of files and directories as a single atomic transaction. In your working copy, you can change files' contents; create, delete, rename, and copy files and directories; and then commit a complete set of changes as an atomic transaction.

By atomic transaction, we mean simply this: either all of the changes happen in the repository, or none of them happens. Subversion tries to retain this atomicity in the face of program crashes, system crashes, network problems, and other users' actions." [0]

[0] https://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.basic.in-action.html

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#426

Post by protomolecule »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #271
gumby wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astonishingly, It took a long time for revision control to become widespread. Around 1991 when Cygnus had 6-7 employees and was based in the apartment complex where I lived, none of the GNU codebase was hosted in any sort of revision control. Everything was FTPed around as obscurely named tarballs. We had gathered something like 27 different forks of gdb floating around the net, for example. This was back when forkin…

Why is it astonishingly? Git is not a natural development at all. Obviously, it is a standard right now. But I as a hobby coder at my teens I started out with FileZilla and copying over index2.php, index3.php, index_final.php, index_final_2.php and all of it worked well enough when at that point. I took a little break from that hobby, and it still took me a lot of time to build intuition around Git when I started out…

>Git is not a natural development at all.

It's a false dichotomy. Before git there were other version managements systems which would've fit your use case much better than git. Subversion is the easiest perhaps.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#427

Post by philjohn »

I can second the sequence key table being because auto increment wasn't available on some databases. I ran into the same some years back at a company who's software dated back to the late 60's.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#428

Post by medstrom »

silisili wrote: post #370
cruffle_duffle wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sourceforge was complete garbage though. I hated, hated when projects were hosted on it. It was slow, full of ads, impossible to find what you need to download.. GitHub is to sourceforge what Facebook was to MySpace. MySpace was first but it was buggy as hell.

That comparison is pretty harsh and really underemphasizes how awful sourceforge was. Myspace was mostly fine, death by feature creep. Sourceforge was a flaming pile of garbage that was poorly designed, ad laden, AND silently bundled in ad/spyware to normal downloads. A more apt comparison would be comparing Facebook to a hypothetical social media site that when you click on a thumbnail of a user's image, you get a f…

You mean the comparison is too mild? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/harsh

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#429

Post by wink »

cubano wrote: post #350
acchow wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git is not a natural development at all. Obviously, it is a standard right now. Most standard tools we use today are not obvious to beginners nor would they be the first thing that beginners reach for. But senior developers can understand the problems that they claim to address, and why they are important and common problems.

You wouldn't believe the amount of crap I take whenever I introduce very basic version control at the various 3 to 6 man shops I find work at these days. I'm 100% sure that once I left that the devs went back to remote server crash and burn FTP development...they couldn't be bothered with the "hassle" and unneeded headaches of git.

This could have been written and 2014 and 2004 (hi, it's me). There will always be people who don't use it and others who won't remember a time when they hadn't used it :P

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#430

Post by cafard »

dmd wrote: post #97
hinkley wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should use the Antarctic highlands as a prison colony for people found guilty of writing Stringly Typed Code. Siberia isn’t awful enough for them. I thought people who stuffed multiple independent values into a single database column were the worst and then I saw what people can accomplish without even touching a database.

Ha - we did that too at BMS. We were paying Oracle by the column or something like that, so people would shove entire CSV rows into a single value (because corporate said everything HAD to be in Oracle) and then parse them application-side.

A friend once picked up a tiny contract from Uncle Sam, requiring some changes to a Perl script that stashed values as "this/that/thenext" in one column of an Oracle table. She had not previously dealt with Perl, so I explained to her about "split" and "join".

I don't know why the developers had chosen that method.

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