Name: Anonymous 2019-01-11 8:30
programmers write shit code. non-programmers write worse. but which is the worst?
I'm betting on physicists. their're are programs are the epitome of 'writing Fortran in every language'. recently I've had to add functionality to a FIOC program written by a physicist and I had to spend the last two days refactoring it because he refused to learn the higher-level features of the standard library (who needs itertools/functools when you can roll everything by hand with loops?), gave most variables single-letter names and reused each of them for different purposes (
I'm betting on physicists. their're are programs are the epitome of 'writing Fortran in every language'. recently I've had to add functionality to a FIOC program written by a physicist and I had to spend the last two days refactoring it because he refused to learn the higher-level features of the standard library (who needs itertools/functools when you can roll everything by hand with loops?), gave most variables single-letter names and reused each of them for different purposes (
k might have started out as a list but he needed a boolean now so why waste a perfectly good letter?), single-responsibility principle was non-existent (code which generated data didn't return it but it did output it; also, command-line arguments were passed to every single function as a one huge dictionary) and dead code was never removed or commented out, just left there without anything referencing it (after all, haxMyAnus() might not work correctly so it's good to keep hax-my-anus(), haxmyanus() and hax_my_anus() around just in case).