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This is why software development is more of a craft than it is science, at least when it comes to anything not directly to do with deep down algorithms and data
by IgorPartola 2y ago
This is why software development is more of a craft than it is science, at least when it comes to anything not directly to do with deep down algorithms and data structures (though the story of why GNU grep is so fast will be the exception even to that category).
- alyandon 2y agoYeah, you aren't kidding. This particular project was a work of modern abstract art. Imagine a large C++ code base with that was written by people that knew Java, Delphi and maybe a little C but apparently no C++. It was a mess of manual memory management errors, re-implemented Delphi classes like TString instead of using C++ equivalents, etc. Why they decided to implement it in C++ instead of a language they knew I'll never understand. It took me about 2 months of continuous effort to replace all the C-isms, TStrings, XML config, etc with sane C++ equivalents. After I was done, it'd run for months with no issues whereas before you were lucky if it'd run for 2 days without it crashing. Needless to say, I felt accomplished because I didn't get paged in the middle of the night from the thing falling over all the time.