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It’s this way for anyone who’s good or bad at anything. If you’re not good, you’ll be confused and clumsily try to get the results you want. If you’re good, yo

• jmillikin 16y ago
  Being a crank doesn't just mean somebody's inexperienced, it means their thought processes are unusually flawed. Sit a normal person down in front of a computer and tell them to write code, and you'll end up with a typical spaghetti-code swamp. But it's a common kind of swamp -- it'll have global variables, no error handling, lots of redundant code, but fundamentally some logical structure will be present. In contrast, tell a crank to write code, and you'll end up with the programming equivalent of Finnegan's Wake (or, if you're unlucky, Timecube). Execution paths meander and ultimately lead nowhere; comments which are not just wrong, but bear no relation to any nearby code; often, remarks that the compiler is wrong and only the crank is aware. Crank code can be amusing to read, but I can't imagine dealing with it in a professional environment.
  • losethos 16y ago
    Maybe the crank wrote the compiler :-) Some people have never have experienced the joy of compiler bugs. My boss at Ticketmaster wrote our Pascal compiler. I wrote a C compiler. Programming in an environment with compiler bugs has a profound effect on someone. Permanantly brain dammaged, except when there really are unfixed compiler bugs. On the plus side you laugh at the people who think it takes gods to write compilers.