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I worked on a piece of code that literally drove the guy who wrote it round the bend. He had a mental breakdown, ran away, and eventually ended up in a differe

I worked on a piece of code that literally drove the guy who wrote it round the bend. He had a mental breakdown, ran away, and eventually ended up in a different state ~3000 miles away. It wasn't so bad. Now debugging code written by Chemistry Students... that's some scary stuff right there. Which is not to go all elitist and put Comp Sci degrees up on a pedestal, one of the better coders I've had the pleasure of working with was a trained vet. He was very methodical. Actually, now that I think about it, working with something that if you make it angry it will bite your hand off, is probably good preparation for dealing with a compiler...

rwmj 16y ago
You should try working with code written by hardware engineers. Those guys are extremely smart when it comes to digital and analog electronics, but never ever let them write a device driver ...
- Stormbringer 16y ago
  I did. Same job that drove the guy nuts. Turns out most of the obscure errors were on the driver end. Go figure. Arguably, at the exorbitant rate the company was paying these bozos to fix the problems with their own code (approx $200 per hour) there wasn't really much of an incentive for them to get it right the first time...
- pjscott 16y ago
  I had the interesting experience of maintaining a device driver written by a hardware engineer, for a servo motor. There was no reason for it to be in assembly language, but it was. No comments, either. Very bright guy, but he'd just never absorbed much common sense about coding up maintainable software. I think the thing here is that, for the most part, hardware guys don't want to write software, so they don't bother to learn how to do it right. This usually comes back to bite them in the ass, when they end up needing to write some code anyway.
- dkarl 16y ago
  Those guys are too smart. When you start to write programs that are too big to understand as one lump, you start to learn to decompose your code and organize it in ways that help you understand it a little bit at a time. They never do that; they just keep the whole program in their head at one time. Tell them that a function should do one "simple" thing that makes sense as a unit, and they have no problem putting the whole program in that function. Actually, I shouldn't say they are too smart, because they will continue to program like that even when it causes them problems....

rwmj 16y ago

You should try working with code written by hardware engineers. Those guys are extremely smart when it comes to digital and analog electronics, but never ever let them write a device driver ...

Stormbringer 16y ago
I did. Same job that drove the guy nuts. Turns out most of the obscure errors were on the driver end. Go figure. Arguably, at the exorbitant rate the company was paying these bozos to fix the problems with their own code (approx $200 per hour) there wasn't really much of an incentive for them to get it right the first time...
pjscott 16y ago
I had the interesting experience of maintaining a device driver written by a hardware engineer, for a servo motor. There was no reason for it to be in assembly language, but it was. No comments, either. Very bright guy, but he'd just never absorbed much common sense about coding up maintainable software. I think the thing here is that, for the most part, hardware guys don't want to write software, so they don't bother to learn how to do it right. This usually comes back to bite them in the ass, when they end up needing to write some code anyway.
dkarl 16y ago
Those guys are too smart. When you start to write programs that are too big to understand as one lump, you start to learn to decompose your code and organize it in ways that help you understand it a little bit at a time. They never do that; they just keep the whole program in their head at one time. Tell them that a function should do one "simple" thing that makes sense as a unit, and they have no problem putting the whole program in that function. Actually, I shouldn't say they are too smart, because they will continue to program like that even when it causes them problems....