Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot
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I can't access the exact wording right now, but sometimes my phone's weather app can't find the alert message for a severe weather condition that's been reported, and tells me "there are no severe alerts at this time; unless you're a crazy stormchaser, that's a good thing".
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The UI being cute is not so much of a problem. I think that before going for people who put a frowny face on your error screen, there is a whole army of developers that try to be clever, or funny, or cute in naming stuff.
They tend to attach crazy names to their classes, methods, and variables that follow some weird metaphor, or a pun, which is oh so very funny — unless you are from a different country, haven't watched the same TV shows, have a different form of autism or none whatsoever, or basically are not the author himself*. If you have even a vestigial sense of humor, this cute cleverness makes you cringe.
Usually there's a whole chapter of the docs explaining all the cleverness, while the real everyday stuff is Here Be Dragons.
*I'm not being a sexist here. I haven't yet met a woman coder who would suffer from being too clever by half while thinking up identifiers, or a defining metaphor.
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@darkmatter said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
@steve_the_cynic said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
It had a QR code. (Sorry, no picture.)
like so?
Pretty much. Probably a different code - I don't sight-read QR codes, so the exact pattern of dots isn't interesting to me. It's interesting that they used a standard code rather than the Microsoft one with all the triangles, but it does make sense.
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Had this this morning. You were supposed to restart automatically at 2am so don't give me this bollocks, gobshite.
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@boner Your computer made a date with you?
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@wft said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
*I'm not being a sexist here. I haven't yet met a woman coder
who would suffer from being too clever by half while thinking up identifiers, or a defining metaphor.FTFY
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@vault_dweller I guess you don't get out much.
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@steve_the_cynic said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
It's interesting that they used a standard code rather than the Microsoft one with all the triangles
That code was bullshit. It was just a tiny identifier that fetched the rest of the data from Microsoft's servers.
Then it was abandoned and the servers closed. What a surprise, Microsoft hyping a product then immediately abandoning it!
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@anonymous234 said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
What a surprise, Microsoft hyping a product, completely fucking up the marketing, and then
immediatelyabandoning it when they get bored!FTFY ;)
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@boner said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Had this this morning. You were supposed to restart automatically at 2am so don't give me this bollocks, gobshite.
'Active hours' are a bunch of bullshit too. It can variously range for me from 8am to 6am but I can't put in any more than 18 hours as my active hours. Do you really need more than like twenty minutes to install updates at worst?
At least Windows has 'em. My phone will mass-update everything whenever it wants, as early as 11pm sometimes.
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@pie_flavor said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Do you really need more than like twenty minutes to install updates at worst?
Yes, but only for the major updates, like the Anniversary/Creators' updates.
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@raceprouk said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
@pie_flavor said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Do you really need more than like twenty minutes to install updates at worst?
Yes, but only for the major updates, like the Anniversary/Creators' updates.
Which you have to explicitly authorize, rather than them being auto-updated. So there's zero sense in this.
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@raceprouk said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Yes, but only for the major updates, like the Anniversary/Creators' updates.
It depends mostly on how long it takes to make a checkpoint of the existing system, so far as I can tell. Or if you've not got with the programme and are still using a HDD as the system disk.
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@dkf said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
@raceprouk said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Yes, but only for the major updates, like the Anniversary/Creators' updates.
It depends mostly on how long it takes to make a checkpoint of the existing system, so far as I can tell. Or if you've not got with the programme and are still using a HDD as the system disk.
It took less than thirty minutes to update my old laptop (which had the processing power of a toaster oven) from 8 to 10, and that's with an HDD. I'm talking about the installation process, not downloading, just to be clear.
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@wft said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
*I'm not being a sexist here. I haven't yet met a woman coder who would suffer from being too clever by half while thinking up identifiers, or a defining metaphor.
I must admit that the most egregious examples of this that I've seen were in code produced by men.
1990-1993: I worked on code that had been produced by an external software house (on-shore, but outsourced), and it featured:
- A primitive multithreading system whose central control variable had been named the day after the programmer bought a new car. I'll let you guess what car he bought. It won't be hard, because the variable was called
golf_gti. - A set of ugly calculations for gas compressibility as a function of gas mixture, temperature and pressure. They are ugly, ugly calculations, and the equations feature lots of jolly Greek letters, in particular "pi" and the Greek letter for "T". It's usually called "tau", pronounced as if you stuck the letter T on the front of an expression of pain spelled "ow". But someone involved in the process pronounced it as "tor". And the "example" code from which the production code was derived had been written in Basic, of a dialect that banned embedded keywords, so they couldn't call the variable
tOR. The result: I inherited this equation with "tau" spelledappleand "pi" spelledpie.
Many years later, at a large US-based supplier of financial information services:
evildead.c. No more needs to be said, although I'll note in passing that the variables and internal functions were all named after things in the film, and it was production code.
- A primitive multithreading system whose central control variable had been named the day after the programmer bought a new car. I'll let you guess what car he bought. It won't be hard, because the variable was called
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@wft said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Usually there's a whole chapter of the docs explaining all the cleverness, while the real everyday stuff is Here Be Dragons.
SPANK SPANK! BITCH!!!
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@steve_the_cynic said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
I don't sight-read QR codes, so the exact pattern of dots isn't interesting to me. It's interesting that they used a standard code rather than the Microsoft one with all the triangles, but it does make sense.
IIRC the triangle one requires a color display & color camera.
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@pie_flavor LOL. Love that site.
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@steve_the_cynic said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
I must admit that the most egregious examples of this that I've seen were in code produced by men.
I must confess that the most egregious example of this that I've seen was in code produced by myself.
Tobey Faire, it the first programming project I had done for money, and it was being done in the off moments between trying to sell used computers to people who knew they wanted to get on the Intarwebs but didn't really know why. Whether it counts as a 'professional' programming job probably depends on whether or not you mean the kind of 'professional' that @Lorne-Kates buries in his back yard. Let's just say that in this case, "P.O.S." didn't just stand for "Point Of Sale".
It was 1996 and I was a dumb twentysomething who had managed to convince the boss that selling computers using pen and carbon paper to write up receipts gave the wrong impression. I was then told to use an already long-obsolete dev tool (FoxPro for MS-DOS v. 2.5) on an equally dated 80386 box to creatively loaf on the job while the boss' wife glared at me in impotent rage over the fact that her husband got the last word in that particular argument (for now). I was in a puckish mood for the first week or two of the project (and had to get around the eight-effective-characters limit for variable names), before the reality of just how deep the hole I dug myself into had dawned on me.
Highlights of the naming include:
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The error-handling module - basically a few canned windows, written by hand because the GUI builder was a crap sandwich - was called OOPS.PRG. It contained a pop-up window called S_O_L and a condition variable named snafu..
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An employee data table called Slaves. The flag for whether the employee was currently with the company or not had two states, stuck and canned. The main index for the table was called luser.
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The customer table had indexes called rube and sucker.
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The function that checked whether the user had done all the steps needed to complete a transaction was called alldonep(), because Lisp. (Actually, because I thought the older Lisp predicate naming convention was funny. I didn't really know Lisp yet.)
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And then there's this
assholegem:cus_p = .F. ** In addition to being an awful pun, cus_p is the ** 'customer known' flag. If true, then there is a record ** of the customer, which can be used immediately; otherwise, ** a new record must be made for the person before setting ** the cust_num variable in the transaction record.
(Why yes, I was way to fond of The Hacker's Dictionary at that time, why do you ask?)
- The event flag for internal email was called now_what.
- The comment "This code is cursed", which I had inserted into every source code file. It wasn't wrong, but the reason behind it was that I had seen the phrase in a list of 'funny things found in code' (in a print book on programmer culture, in fact) a few years earlier, and had found it so charming that I was adding it to every program I wrote at the time.
And, oh yeah, I was already showing signs of the tendency towards over-engineering that would be one of the banes of my career: I had stubbed out several features which were not, and would never be, necessary, but which I thought would be 'a good idea'. Like an SMTP MUA. No, really. Did I mention that this was in FoxPro for MS-DOS?
@steve_the_cynic said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
1990-1993: I worked on code that had been produced by an external software house (on-shore, but outsourced), and it featured:
- A set of ugly calculations for gas compressibility as a function of gas mixture, temperature and pressure. They are ugly, ugly calculations, and the equations feature lots of jolly Greek letters, in particular "pi" and the Greek letter for "T". It's usually called "tau", pronounced as if you stuck the letter T on the front of an expression of pain spelled "ow". But someone involved in the process pronounced it as "tor".
Was this person from Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, or Arkansas, by any chance? Those are, AFAICT, the US states where people are most likely to have a habit of turning 'oh' and 'ow' into 'er' and 'or' (e.g., 'Windows' -> 'Winders', pronounces 'win-ders' with the emphasis on the first syllable).
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@pie_flavor said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
It took less than thirty minutes to update my old laptop (which had the processing power of a toaster oven) from 8 to 10, and that's with an HDD.
It'd take a lot longer to try to update it without an HDD, what with all the floppy-swapping...
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@scholrlea said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
I was then told to use an already long-obsolete dev tool (FoxPro for MS-DOS v. 2.5) on an equally dated 80386 box to creatively loaf on the job while the boss' wife glared at me in impotent rage over the fact that her husband got the last word in that particular argument (for now).
Bet it ran fast though. I kept my first development box (which I think was also an 80386) long after it was obsolete with the attitude that if I could run and test my software on there that there was no way it'd have performance problems on the customer's hardware and I wouldn't have to touch it again.
I don't really have that attitude anymore, but I note that now developers get whiz-bang boxes a lot of the time and wonder why their code runs like shit everywhere else. Wonder if my way back then was better.
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@heterodox said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
I note that now developers get whiz-bang boxes a lot of the time and wonder why their code runs like shit everywhere else. Wonder if my way back then was better.
Yes it was. And that's the solution we should adopt: all developers should get bare minimum spec machines, so they would write optimized code.
Then, we wouldn't end up with Node.JS code on a desktop app
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@heterodox said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
@scholrlea said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
I was then told to use an already long-obsolete dev tool (FoxPro for MS-DOS v. 2.5) on an equally dated 80386 box to creatively loaf on the job while the boss' wife glared at me in impotent rage over the fact that her husband got the last word in that particular argument (for now).
Bet it ran fast though.
On a newer system, it probably would have. On the system it was developed for - and targeting - it ran... meh.
The thing is, the boss's Brillant Idea was that he had bought about twenty identical 386 machines from a company that had upgraded to Window 95 at the end of the previous year (don't you love early adopters who upgrade without knowing why they are upgrading, but "there's a new version out and OMGWTFBBQ!1!1!1111!! we gotta get it for everyone in the company including the janitors"?) only to find that most of the people looking to buy systems also wanted to run Win95 (but still wanted machines that cost $350) because that was what they were told they needed. For raisins.
These systems, BTW, were five years old by then and had been somewhat shitty even when the came out (386SX, yo). He was having an easier time selling Apple //e packages by then (Berkeley, go figure), so e was desperate to turn them into something other than paperweights, especially since his wife (the store manager, who mostly ran things smoothly if rather viciously whenever he wasn't sticking his fingers into things and imposing terrible purchasing decisions on her) had reamed him out royally for buying those white elephants in the first place.
He did this a lot... at this same time they had shelfs full of PS/2 Model 30s from 1987, about a dozen IBM PS/1 PPC systems that would run OS/2 but not Windows, and four or five SuperMax PPC Mac clones made during the 15 minutes when Apple decided to license Mac technology, all 'great deals' he'd made when she wasn't watching.
When she was around, however, you would have been lucky if she deigned to buy a brand-new Pentium 166MHz with 4MB or RAM and a 500MB drive (pretty close to SoTA at the time) for $10. This made the purchasing policy just a wee bit schizoid.
So running FoxPro well (DOS version or no) wasn't in the cards no matter what. I would have run acceptably, but not well.
As I explained in the page I linked, she opposed the project from the start, because for someone who made a living selling computers she sure as shit hated the machines... and the software they ran... and the people who bought them... and the people who she paid to sell them. Imagine a shrewish, middle-aged Chinese woman playing the role of Petunia Dursley in a local amateur stage production of Harry Potter and the Stoned Philosopher and you have a good handle on Rita.
In contrast, her husband Bill seemed to be channelling a laid back NorCal version of the Laughing Buddha - chubby, smiley, affable, and avuncular, if not terribly sharp. He was in the business because he was an ex-programmer from the FORTRAN IV days and had been something of an early adopter when CP/M was hot. He imagined that he'd be able to maintain the system when I left. Having seen his idea of 'great code' in his homebrew AppleSoft-based labeling program, I was skeptical about this.
The skepticism proved right, when I showed him the code and the first thing he did was point to a while loop and asked, "What's that?". I couldn't actually convince him that it was a loop; he couldn't wrap his head around the idea that FoxPro didn't actually have a GO TO statement (at least, not one like the ones in FORTRAN and BASIC - inexplicably, it did use that keyword for something to do with iterating through table records, but he couldn't get those, either). This was particularly bizarre, since FORTRAN did have DO loops (basically, for, though the syntax was a bit primitive) from the start, so it shouldn't have been so incomprehensible.
But this is way off topic, so I will leave that here for now.
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@scholrlea said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Was this person from Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, or Arkansas, by any chance? Those are, AFAICT, the US states where people are most likely to have a habit of turning 'oh' and 'ow' into 'er' and 'or' (e.g., 'Windows' -> 'Winders', pronounces 'win-ders' with the emphasis on the first syllable).
No, it was in the south of (olde) England, and the only person involved in the process with any connection to the US was me, since this was the first job I found after returning to England after nine years in the US.
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@cvi said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Maybe if we use a different emoticon? Maybe something more modern, that appeals to the younger audiences. Let's try...
Is that Pedo Bear?
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@blakeyrat said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
@wft said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Usually there's a whole chapter of the docs explaining all the cleverness, while the real everyday stuff is Here Be Dragons.
SPANK SPANK! BITCH!!!
COMPLAIN
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@heterodox said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
This brings back so many memories of horrible moments of terror and dispair...
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@lorne-kates said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
@pie_flavor said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
On the topic of cute: Clippy, anyone?
Mine is right next to the bugs 🐜
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@boner said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Had this this morning. You were supposed to restart automatically at 2am so don't give me this bollocks, gobshite.
Not even my computers want to date me...
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@pie_flavor said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
My phone will mass-update everything whenever it wants, as early as 11pm sometimes.
ProTip for Android: You need to go to the Play Store, Settings, Auto-update apps, and you can completely disable that. For OS updates.... Well it better damn well NOT be updating whenever it wants!
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@pie_flavor said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
@raceprouk said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
@pie_flavor said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Do you really need more than like twenty minutes to install updates at worst?
Yes, but only for the major updates, like the Anniversary/Creators' updates.
Which you have to explicitly authorize, rather than them being auto-updated. So there's zero sense in this.
I didn't explicitely authorize this.
Nope, it's going to shove itself in my face every few hours telling me I need to fix it.
No! I'm busy! Go away!
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@magus said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Canadians sure are violent people.
What's the Canadian word for "Fuck You" again?
Was it "sorry"?
I forget.
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@xaade said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
@magus said in Feature Request: developers who try to be "cute" in Enterprise-level professional software should be shot:
Canadians sure are violent people.
What's the Canadian word for "Fuck You" again?
Was it "sorry"?
I forget.
No, it's 'eh'.
