501–510 of 588 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> people would shove entire CSV rows into a single value So you invented a “no-sql” document database in Oracle.
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.
No we should reserve the antarctic highlands for type system fetischists who write abstract protocol adaptor factory repositories for every damn simple piece of functionality.
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 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.
Senior developers have simply grown accustomed to the warts, and accepted their fate - some even celebrating their mastery of the warts as necessary knowledge.
The only pragmatic reason not to change things is the compatibility chaos that will ensue and the resources required - not that problems don't exist.
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…
If I were being charitable (sometimes I try), I'd guess he was concerned that an array of scalars is going to have a high per scalar size overhead and perhaps worse cache locality, whereas the non-unicode perl string implementation at the time probably just stored the string as a large char* with a length prefix. In a similar vein, an alternate explanation may just be that a lot of bioinformatics algorithms are descr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I were being charitable (sometimes I try), I'd guess he was concerned that an array of scalars is going to have a high per scalar size overhead and perhaps worse cache locality, whereas the non-unicode perl string implementation at the time probably just stored the string as a large char* with a length prefix. In a similar vein, an alternate explanation may just be that a lot of bioinformatics algorithms are descr…
I’ve seen this “misunderstood genius” argument so many times I think there needs to be a law to refute it: Never attribute to competence that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Which version are we talking about? Segfaults were exceedingly rare either way. Especially so when I stopped using raw pointers. But yes, to no one's surprise, early versions were a mess. I can agree with you on that. I can't agree about the same about the last versions though. It was replaced by WebRTC that would sometimes just suddenly disconnect your calls, right. > I managed to improve the situation after week…
> but that still doesn't justify No, that really justifies anything. Programs should be pleasant for users to use, not for developers to work on them
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He got furious when he was unable to call some journalist, cursed at me in front of the entire team and sent me a termination notice. Honestly does not sound like a very healthy person to work for anyway.
There are two sides to every story
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 responsi…
Speaking as an outsider... Your comment reads as a blatant ad-hominem attack and does nothing to support your point. You should consider toning it down if your goal is to convince anyone.