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One of this week's entries is the type that drives me buggy. Guess which one.
Regular contributor Pascal splains this shopping saga: "Amazon now requires anti-virus software to have an EPA Registration number."
As developers, we often have to engage with management who doesn't have a clue what it is we do, or how. Even if that manager was technical once, their technical background is frequently out of date, and their spirit has been sapped by the endless meetings and politics that being a manager entails. And it's often these managers who have some degree of control over where our career is going to progress, so we need to make them happy.
Which means… <clickbait-voice>LEVEL UP YOUR CAREER WITH THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK!</clickbait-voice>. You need to make managers happy, and if there's one thing that makes managers happy, it's dashboards. Take something complicated and multivariate, and boil it down to a simple system. Traffic lights are always a favorite: green is good, red is bad, yellow is also bad.
When you're a large company, like Oracle, you can force your customers to do things your way. "Because we said so," is something a company like that can get away with. Conversely, a small company is more restricted- you have to work hard to keep your customers happy.
When Doreen joined Initech, they were a small company with a long history and not too many customers. In the interests of keeping those customers happy, each customer got their own custom build of the software, with features tailored to their specific needs. So, Initrode was on "INITRODE.9.1", while the Soggy Beans coffee shop chain was on "SOGGY.5.2". Managing those versions was a pain, but it was Doreen's boss, Elliot, who ensured that pain escalated to anguish.
When Daniel was young, he took one of those adventure trips that included a multi-day hike through a rainforest. At the time, it was one of the most difficult and laborious experiences he'd ever had.
Then he inherited an antique PHP 5.3 application, written by someone who names variables like they're spreadsheet columns: $ag, $ah, and $az are all variables which show up. Half of those are globals. The application is "modularized" into many, many PHP files, but this ends up creating include chains tens of files deep, which makes it nigh impossible to actually understand.
Last week, we saw some possibly ancient Pascal code. Leilani sends us some more… modern Pascal to look at today.
This block of code comes from a developer who has… some quirks. For example, they have a very command-line oriented approach to design. This means that, even when making a GUI application, they want convenient keyboard shortcuts. So, to close a dialog, you hit "CTRL+C", because who would ever use that keyboard shortcut for any other function at all? There's no reason a GUI would use "CTRL+C" for anything but closing windows.
We generally don't like to make fun of innocent misuses of a second language. Many of us struggle with their first. But sometimes we honestly can't tell which is first and which is zeroeth.
Whovian stombaker pontificates "Internationalization is hard. Sometimes, some translations are missing, some other times, there are strange concatenations due to language peculiarities. But here, we have everything wrong and no homogeneity in the issues."
Back in the mid-2000s, Maurice got less than tempting offer. A large US city had hired a major contracting firm, that contracting firm had subcontracted out the job, and those subcontractors let the project spiral completely out of control. The customer and the primary contracting firm wanted to hire new subcontractors to try and save the project.
As this was the mid-2000s, the project had started its life as a VB6 project. Then someone realized this was a terrible idea, and decided to make it a VB.Net project, without actually changing any of the already written code, though. That leads to code like this: