Name: Anonymous 2012-03-16 14:45
I did and i forgot i was taking a dump.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.html
Anyway..., it makes you think.
A preview
Millions of Lines of Code
I recently had the opportunity to watch a self-professed Java programmer give a presentation in which one slide listed Problems (with his current Java system) and the next slide listed Requirements (for the wonderful new vaporware system). The #1 problem he listed was code size: his system has millions of lines of code.
Wow! I've sure seen that before, and I could really empathize with him. Geoworks had well over ten million lines of assembly code, and I'm of the opinion that this helped bankrupt them (although that also appears to be a minority opinion – those industry programmers just never learn!) And I worked at Amazon for seven years; they have well over a hundred million lines of code in various languages, and "complexity" is frequently cited internally as their worst technical problem.
So I was really glad to see that this guy had listed code size as his #1 problem.
Then I got my surprise. He went on to his Requirements slide, on which he listed "must scale to millions of lines of code" as a requirement. Everyone in the room except me just nodded and accepted this requirement. I was floored.
Why on earth would you list your #1 problem as a requirement for the new system? I mean, when you're spelling out requirements, generally you try to solve problems rather than assume they're going to be created again. So I stopped the speaker and asked him what the heck he was thinking.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.html
Anyway..., it makes you think.
A preview
Millions of Lines of Code
I recently had the opportunity to watch a self-professed Java programmer give a presentation in which one slide listed Problems (with his current Java system) and the next slide listed Requirements (for the wonderful new vaporware system). The #1 problem he listed was code size: his system has millions of lines of code.
Wow! I've sure seen that before, and I could really empathize with him. Geoworks had well over ten million lines of assembly code, and I'm of the opinion that this helped bankrupt them (although that also appears to be a minority opinion – those industry programmers just never learn!) And I worked at Amazon for seven years; they have well over a hundred million lines of code in various languages, and "complexity" is frequently cited internally as their worst technical problem.
So I was really glad to see that this guy had listed code size as his #1 problem.
Then I got my surprise. He went on to his Requirements slide, on which he listed "must scale to millions of lines of code" as a requirement. Everyone in the room except me just nodded and accepted this requirement. I was floored.
Why on earth would you list your #1 problem as a requirement for the new system? I mean, when you're spelling out requirements, generally you try to solve problems rather than assume they're going to be created again. So I stopped the speaker and asked him what the heck he was thinking.