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We had a Star Trek game. It was run on PAPER Terminals.
I have to admit that I did not have the patience required.
I would rather rewrite the system startup routines in Macro-11 Assembler. 
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An old Ohio(?) Scientific binary adder. My teacher had the kit I think
for sometime. One day she just looked at me and said, "Here. This is for you."
I've been a geek with a receding hairline since the sixth grade. I've never
looked back.
Re: That routine CFH - kill, crush, destroy (or refactor/rewrite).
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Ok. Maybe it wasn't Ohio Scientific. It looked pretty much like this though:
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Venting of anger was always more fun with IDDQD and IDKFA... Not IDSPISPOPD, because then you might accidentally bypass a set of pixels that needed to be vaporized.
And don't listen to him... Those Brits may think they're important, but we New Yorkers know that everything outside of Manhattan would be a desolate wasteland devoid of life, if not for the shining beacon of our presence 
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Wanna exchange locations? I'm ALL about it
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
"When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." -- Mike Hankey
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Look, I have blown my top in here and still no ban. Just remember Elephant & Sunshine and you will be fine! As for the title Quote: have you ever been stuck on a programming problem
honestly, who hasn't?
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Frank Alviani wrote: 100% of the lounge has been there.
only 100%?
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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BruceN wrote: magic numbers: return code 97.
97 is not a magic number. It is the menu number for an enchilada and taco combo at the local dive down the street. duh.
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A really horrible PHB might write:
But why would a button return both an enchilada and a taco combo? That's a horrible design!
Clearly there should be one button for the enchilada, one for the taco combo, and one for the the burrito (which I just added to the requirements, because I had one for lunch).
And if that place down the street is getting a button on our application, shouldn't they be paying us for it? Let me talk to the legal department and see if we can sue them...
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I've spent the last 2 years doing precisely that...and maybe the last 20.
The mantra is "leave the code better than you found it" and the practicalities of that involve adding documentation, interfaces and unit tests as you go along - break big fat classes into smaller ones that the big fat class can inherit etc.
And primal scream therapy helps.
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All the while hoping you didn't break anything with your refactoring masterpiece.
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Slacker007 wrote: All the while hoping you didn't break anything with your refactoring masterpiece.
Test, don't hope.
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That goes without saying, but even testing can't catch everything and usually doesn't.
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Duncan Edwards Jones wrote: break big fat classes into smaller ones that the big fat class can inherit etc.
Classes? Is that some new fancy way of programming that hasn't yet filtered down to those of use who support legacy code.
In the 'real world'(tm) refactoring consists of adding a blank line after every thousandth line of densely coded unicharacter identifier, zero comment scrawl just so we can fold the line printer paper more easily.
And 'code reuse' is using the line printer listing of a mega assembly program as free underlay for carpets. Yes - I genuinely have done this!
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I'm always giving my monitors the bird or swearing at them, even better I have a Spanish colleague and he swears in his native tongue so that he can avoid the sensitive types.
Every day, thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians.
Help end the violence EAT BACON
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I am spanish leaving in germany working in India at the moment. A local guy has teached me some words in Panjabi, so I have plenty of languages to choose. But mother language is the one that comes without thinking. When my colleges hear me swearing on spanish they get a bit distance. They already know when I do it, it is reaaaaaaalllllyyyy bad.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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try del /F /S /Q . or rmdir /S /Q <project dir="">
Then rewrite everything from scratch ...
Espen Harlinn
Chief Architect - Powel AS
Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail. Edsger W.Dijkstra
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BruceN wrote: return code 97
Isn't that better than this?
#define NINETY_SIX 97
Such code is not Martian, but Earthian.
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BruceN wrote: Martians
Matt Damon can code? Who knew.
BruceN wrote: You'd have to be a floating database guru clad in a white toga and ghandi level of sereneness to fix this goddamn clusterfuck.
I am stealing this one as my signature here.
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One thing I have done in the past when working with legacy code is the following:
Ask for a week of no disturbance from others - preferably get an office to yourself or if you can work from home.
Then print off all the code you are working on.
Lay the code on the floor or table, if you have a big table, and slowly go through it with a pen adding comments as you read through it.
I have found this to be very effective in understanding and fixing big coding problems that I did not create(and sometimes for those that I did create).
Think of it this way - it can take you a month, or more, to fix it in your normal work time or a week of dedicated time in an office on your own - only a dumb boss would not see the benefit of allowing you the space to go through this on your own.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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GuyThiebaut wrote: only a dumb boss
There's always a catch.
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Had problem like that--"legacy" web app written in some third party take on ASP.NET and JSP. It was "legacy" in that the code was written before we took over a contract by another contractor (so no going back to them without major $$), but it was only a year old.
Now that we were responsible, the users were asking that we fix the weird issue of extremely poor performance and daily lockups of the entire system.
I was given the task of figuring out how the code worked so I could go through and fix it. When I finally get the source code installed and 3rd party IDE up..."Hmmm...almost zero logic in the code as far as I can tell...these are strange calls..."
I go look in the database, and voila! All stored procedures. I tell myself, "Okay, I can work with this!", and start scrolling through a stored procedure...
...and scrolling...
...and scrolling...
...and scrolling...
Oh My Elephanting God! One stored procedure (the one that was suspected in causing the lockup) was 12,000 lines! And there were 30 more! Tried printing it out to do a manual refactoring--it was 250 pages of stored procedure SQL, and there was no consistency in anything.
My final report back was this:
1. This is a horrible app.
2. If you want it "fixed", I need 6 weeks and the option to just rewrite the whole thing in a more stable and common language (.NET, JSP, assembler, whatever...I didn't care--anything would be better than this nightmarish blend of old ASP and Black Speech).
3. If you want it to run "better", move it to a big iron database (we had several) and don't look at it until you want to rewrite it.
They went with option #3. Every 6-8 months, I would be told to take another look, and occasionally I would be able to make a small modification that wouldn't crash the whole system.
I left a few years later, and as far as I know, it's still out there, a monument to both Horrible Implementation and "The problem I couldn't crack".
vuolsi così colà dove si puote
ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare
--The answer to Minos and any question of "Why are we doing it this way?"
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