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A self-professed perl hacker, my first Real Programming Job had me working eight hours a day in a horrid little proprietary scripting language without pointers
by Dove 16y ago
A self-professed perl hacker, my first Real Programming Job had me working eight hours a day in a horrid little proprietary scripting language without pointers (or references), without proper data structures beyond arrays, and with a long list of language warts and misfeatures. Three things got me through it.
#1: Work on a project you believe in. Are you doing something great? Something world-changing? Are there people you care about who are going to really appreciate your work? Do you really, really wish that what you're building existed? That'll help you slog through with the technology you're forced to use.
#2: Mentally prototype in your language of choice. I was coding in CrapplyLang but I as thinking in perl. My code was littered with comments that said, "In perl, this would be <oneliner>" followed by thirty to fifty lines of terse nasty.
#3: Get out before it causes permanent damage.
- madrik 16y agoCouldn't you have made Perl write the proprietary language programs for you?
- Dove 16y agoI was about a month away from doing exactly that when I finally got another job.
- jiaaro 16y agoyour code sounds like an excellent way for a programmer of CrapplyLang to learn perl ;)
- Dove 16y agoCrapplyLang has programmers like the Cyberathlete Professional League has athletes. The big, awesome system I wrote . . . I left instructions for no one to modify it under any circumstances. Ever. My boss asked, "Isn't there someone else in BigCorp that can maintain this code?" No, there was no one, I could say with great authority. I was BigCorp's uncontested expert on CrapplyLang; its other experts were all my students or colleagues. One had a fascination with subroutines such that every subroutine was two lines long, called another subroutine, and manipulated global variables. Another . . . well, let's just say she called me up three years later having lost a closing curly brace. Because she didn't realize she had to put one in. In the mean time, those perl lines expanded into terse nasty? Tended to be things like binary trees implemented entirely with strings (XML? Yeah, something like that.) or regular expressions unrolled into finite state machines. I would have had a hard time making heads or tails of it without the perl comments. The way I put it to my boss, you need to find someone smart enough to figure out how to get things done in CrapplyLang, and dumb enough to do it. I was the only person I was aware of in all of existence who qualified.