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snacks
snacks
The worst programmer I ever knew was a good programmer. More likely you're stupid and incompetent to judge. I mean, his code was good. What made him the worst programmer I ever knew was stubbornness. He wrote the wrong thing, and never, ever turned back. He had a particular task that was daunting, so he met it with a dauntingly complex solution. One aspect of this solution was a new BASIC-like programming language (compiled to C via lex and yacc) that knew how to undo all of its commands at any time. It could receive an interrupt from the user that caused it to reverse execution back through commands, up and down the call stack, undoing everything along the way, until it reached a "stop back tracking" command. He spent months alone on it and the fact that it worked as well as it did is a tribute to his brilliance.
Unfortunately an exec saw it in an incomplete state and fell in love with it. Next thing he knew he had two weeks to deliver it. He tried his best to fix it up, but as soon as people started using it the bug reports started piling up. It had lots and lots of weird, non-deterministic bugs. They threw more people at it (that's when I came in), but in the end it drove him insane.
He stopped coming to work, stopped answering his phone. No one heard from him for weeks. I spoke with him months later and he said he just quit being a programmer. I spent a month trying to fix/figure out what the code was doing. I looked everywhere I could think of for information about languages designed to reverse execution direction. (All I found was a mailing list devoted to hypothetical CPUs with an unused mirror CPU that does the opposite of what the used CPU does, all so they can use transistors that are like electron see-saws instead of electron cliff divers, which would result in virtually no power consumption or heat, but conjures the spooky image of an evil negaverse lurking in the CPU running MicrosoftWord's evil twin... - Wouldn't that be Word's good twin? - anyway, back to my story.
https://wiki.c2.com/?BadProgrammer
Unfortunately an exec saw it in an incomplete state and fell in love with it. Next thing he knew he had two weeks to deliver it. He tried his best to fix it up, but as soon as people started using it the bug reports started piling up. It had lots and lots of weird, non-deterministic bugs. They threw more people at it (that's when I came in), but in the end it drove him insane.
He stopped coming to work, stopped answering his phone. No one heard from him for weeks. I spoke with him months later and he said he just quit being a programmer. I spent a month trying to fix/figure out what the code was doing. I looked everywhere I could think of for information about languages designed to reverse execution direction. (All I found was a mailing list devoted to hypothetical CPUs with an unused mirror CPU that does the opposite of what the used CPU does, all so they can use transistors that are like electron see-saws instead of electron cliff divers, which would result in virtually no power consumption or heat, but conjures the spooky image of an evil negaverse lurking in the CPU running MicrosoftWord's evil twin... - Wouldn't that be Word's good twin? - anyway, back to my story.
https://wiki.c2.com/?BadProgrammer
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chjara ☭
chjara@akko.tuxcrafting.xyz
@snacks i'm also obsessed with reversible computing fair enough
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@chjara accidentally cut off the end of the story btw
In the end I gave up and talked to my boss, who was a great programmer. I told him it looked like a year to make it bug free, with a chance that it was mathematically impossible. We argued until we came up with a stunningly simple solution to the daunting task: five C++ classes that knew how to serialize their history on a common stack. We took about a week to write and test it. It was a big hit with the customers because C++ experience looks much better on a resume than JBMRL (Joe Blow's Magical Reversible Language). Whether something looks good on a resume is the determinant of good or bad programming
In the end I gave up and talked to my boss, who was a great programmer. I told him it looked like a year to make it bug free, with a chance that it was mathematically impossible. We argued until we came up with a stunningly simple solution to the daunting task: five C++ classes that knew how to serialize their history on a common stack. We took about a week to write and test it. It was a big hit with the customers because C++ experience looks much better on a resume than JBMRL (Joe Blow's Magical Reversible Language). Whether something looks good on a resume is the determinant of good or bad programming
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