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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#471

Post by llm_trw »

tomjen3 wrote: post #379
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pretty unnatural, but CVS? That is much closer to the "copy a shared file back and forth between people", except with nice things such as "keep track of who is editing what", "know what the latest edition is", and "keep track of the history". That said, if I was going to start out teaching someone coding today, version control would be timestamped .zip files.

>That said, if I was going to start out teaching someone coding today, version control would be timestamped .zip files.

Oh no, we're in a different time zone.

>We'll put the timezone in.

Oh no, it's daylight savings time.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#472

Post by yyyfb »

MBCook wrote: post #289
fouronnes3 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I never had to deal with “we don’t use source control”, luckily. One company I joined was cleaning up the last vestiges of “customize it for every customer by letting people edit their copy on server,” which predictably turned into a mess. They were all very small customizations to styles or images but enough to make upgrades a total mess. I did work at a company where despite having full source control they didn’t a…

That's not an exception, I think? Most online service businesses that I've worked with wouldn't be able to run their operations from a "cold start". That takes a lot of effort to engineer and in practice it doesn't happen enough, so that's a risk that most are willing to run with.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#473

Post by ptx »

nine_k wrote: post #206
culi wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask roughly what year this was? I can't even imagine something like that today

Visual Basic was a smash hit released in 1991. For reference, Perforce was released in 1995, Subversion in 2000, git in 2005. RCS existed, but only in the Unix world.

The documentation for Office 2000 [1] describes version control for Visual Basic using Visual SourceSafe integration, although I'm not sure if anyone used it.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/d...

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#474

Post by noisy_boy »

jacobyoder wrote: post #245
deathanatos wrote: post #154

Two early databases I worked on. The first contained monetary values. These were split over two columns, a decimal column holding the magnitude of the value, and a string column, containing an ISO currency code. Sounds good so far, right? Well, I learned much later (after, of course, having relied on the data) that the currency code column had only been added after expanding into Europe … but not before expanding int…

> But when the column was added, they just defaulted it all to USD. So and USD value could be CAD — you "just" needed to parse the address column to find out. I bet no one even considered the idea that someone in Canada might pay in USD dollars. I had to... discuss... with someone the possibility that if we were recording money received from a bank, we might do well to record the currency type as well, because... ban…

For such told-you-so scenarios, when there is a disagreement and you are pretty sure you are correct, raise a ticket, describe the issue and close it "As Designed" with comment detailing the discussion (including the overruling party). Next time there is a ticket to do this with "high priority", tell them "we already have a ticket for this, let me reopen it" for everyone to see... risky though, saving face/burning bridges and all that.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#475

Post by noisy_boy »

Nurbek-F wrote: post #400

Databases must not be a place to store any logic

Tell that to millions of lines of stored procedure code across the globe doing heavy lifting on database side. To be clear, I really do not like stored procedures, but they do have their place.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#476

Post by G3rn0ti »

zenogantner wrote: post #406
dmd wrote: post #77

Probably some of the worst code I ever worked on was a 12k+ line single file Perl script for dealing with Human Genome Project data, at Bristol-Myers Squibb, in the late 1990s. The primary author of it didn't know about arrays. I'm not sure if he didn't know about them being something that had already been invented, or whether he just didn't know Perl supported them, but either way, he reimplemented them himself on t…

At least there were tests ;-). I am somewhat surprised that a programmer who was unaware of arrays in Perl managed to have tests. But then again, he managed to implement their own version of arrays, maybe he came up with the concept of software testing by himself :-P

It sounds more like the refactoring started with creating tests for the old code base. We do this with our legacy code base, too, sometimes. Of course, it’s always the high risk code of an application that‘s never been accompanied by automatic tests.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#477

Post by qup »

collinmanderson wrote: post #183
djbusby wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years later there was a scene in Silicon Valley where their VC set a tequila bottle on the delete key and caused havoc. That's when I figured out what happened in 1998.

I have had a website taken down by (pretty sure) a person setting something on their F5 key.

Let's hear it!

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#478

Post by G3rn0ti »

sandebert wrote: post #93
dmd wrote: post #77

Probably some of the worst code I ever worked on was a 12k+ line single file Perl script for dealing with Human Genome Project data, at Bristol-Myers Squibb, in the late 1990s. The primary author of it didn't know about arrays. I'm not sure if he didn't know about them being something that had already been invented, or whether he just didn't know Perl supported them, but either way, he reimplemented them himself on t…

Nice. But I have to ask, considering it was Perl: Could an outsider understand it after you reduced it to 200 lines?

As an outsider of any reasonably large application can you really ever expect to grasp 200 random lines of code in any language?

Maintenance programming is all about understanding the software‘s context and implicit design or a model thereof — even if it is a 20 year old patch work.

Young developers tend to be amazed when I find the source of an obscure bug in our 1M lines of Perl code application as a senior. But the thing is, I just happen to „get the application“ and developed intuition about its inner working. It’s rarely of knowing Perl particularly well. The thing could have been written in TCL or even Brainfuck — with a working model of your software in your head (not with the memory of the total code base, mind you) you will eventually find the problem in a piece of software written in any language.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#479

Post by zimpenfish »

bsder wrote: post #392
mardifoufs wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such a weird rewriting of history. I know blaming VC is very fun and all, but Bitbucket, originally centered around mercurial, had just as much resources as GitHub and even more. Tons of early contributors to git and the ecosystem were from google and Microsoft. Microsoft started using and shifting towards gif when GitHub was still a baby, etc.

> That's such a weird rewriting of history. I know blaming VC is very fun and all, but Bitbucket, originally centered around mercurial, had just as much resources as GitHub and even more. You might want to go review your history before accusing someone else of that. Github took $100 million from VCs in 2012. It then took another $250 million from VCs in 2015. Who the hell else was even within an order of magnitude of…

Minor nit.

> Bitbucket got bought by Atlassian in 2012.

29th September 2010[0] (just over a month after Atlassian raised the $60M.) ~18 months before Github took any VC money. If the VC money was key to Github's success, why did Atlassian/Bitbucket's 18 month head start not get them anywhere?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160303204710/http://www.itwire...

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#480

Post by Snacklive »

This hits close to home. At my current job we have a similar experience, We are building an Android app and the codebase is probably the same age as me (25yo). It started as a Windows Phone app that was later ported over to Android, you can easily find files and segments of the codebase that were auto generated by some code converter from C# to Java.

In the codebase itself you can see the evolution of code styles, older views and the core of the system is written in a very old and very stateful manner while newer parts of the application use modern architecture practices, we have two local databases that load configuration into the app for our different clients and their requirements, an global state is loaded at all times to check what is the correct business logic to follow.

Im a junior, few years into Android Programming and while sometimes its frustrating having to deal with some nasty bug because a random variable is updated for reasons only god knows, i think the experience its giving me its something im going to appreciate years down the road.

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