A quote for the Dev Team

[DaddyHoggy]

By Kernighan's (as in Kernighan and Ritchie – the C programming language)



"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the program, so if you write the program as cleverly as you can, by definition, you won’t be clever enough to debug it."

[Selezen]

Hee hee hee. That pretty much sums up my job!!

Debugging and modifying undocumented code that has been written by at least 10 people over 20 years is NOT an easy task.

I'm a good programmer (at least in my own head), but this job is a challenge!!

[DaddyHoggy]

Hee hee hee. That pretty much sums up my job!!

Debugging and modifying undocumented code that has been written by at least 10 people over 20 years is NOT an easy task.

I'm a good programmer (at least in my own head), but this job is a challenge!!

Oddly enough I'm a terrible programmer but not bad at debugging! My first job with the MOD was debug 120,000 lines of undocumented FORTRAN 77 code (which I had never programmed in or indeed seen until my first day on the job), where the programmer(s) had got bored at some point at created variables based on the contents of a greengrocers shop - so at some points the code really was comparing apples to pears (if the code hadn't of been classified I'd have taken a copy of it just to prove the madness of it) - I spent a year on that - fixing the logic of it, getting loops to terminate when they were supposed to, error checking, error trapping, sensible error messages (not - "How the hell did you get here!" which appeared in several variations throughout the code), just generally making it work as described - and I did this all in "vi" which was the only editor my SPARC 5 box had on it at the time.

[Diziet Sma]

Oddly enough I'm a terrible programmer but not bad at debugging! My first job with the MOD was debug 120,000 lines of undocumented FORTRAN 77 code (which I had never programmed in or indeed seen until my first day on the job), where the programmer(s) had got bored at some point at created variables based on the contents of a greengrocers shop - so at some points the code really was comparing apples to pears (if the code hadn't of been classified I'd have taken a copy of it just to prove the madness of it) - I spent a year on that - fixing the logic of it, getting loops to terminate when they were supposed to, error checking, error trapping, sensible error messages (not - "How the hell did you get here!" which appeared in several variations throughout the code), just generally making it work as described - and I did this all in "vi" which was the only editor my SPARC 5 box had on it at the time.

There'e no doubting I'm a geek then.. I read this and my first thought was, "Wow.. that would be a cool job!"

[DaddyHoggy]

Oddly enough I'm a terrible programmer but not bad at debugging! My first job with the MOD was debug 120,000 lines of undocumented FORTRAN 77 code (which I had never programmed in or indeed seen until my first day on the job), where the programmer(s) had got bored at some point at created variables based on the contents of a greengrocers shop - so at some points the code really was comparing apples to pears (if the code hadn't of been classified I'd have taken a copy of it just to prove the madness of it) - I spent a year on that - fixing the logic of it, getting loops to terminate when they were supposed to, error checking, error trapping, sensible error messages (not - "How the hell did you get here!" which appeared in several variations throughout the code), just generally making it work as described - and I did this all in "vi" which was the only editor my SPARC 5 box had on it at the time.

There'e no doubting I'm a geek then.. I read this and my first thought was, "Wow.. that would be a cool job!"

It was a cool job, the code (once working) helped decide the outcome of a pretty large MOD procurement programme - that kinda thing does give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside. (well, when you as one of the analysts think its the right choice (from a technical point of view) ignoring the political machinations going on in the background)

[NigelJK]

Dummy post

[NigelJK]

Here a good site for thos that need debugging stress relief:

http://thedailywtf.com/

[Selezen]

how about the Big Ball of Mud?