Post #333,403
9/30/10 4:41:20 AM
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How I became a tech writer
I was on a 2 person team. I was the 2nd programmer.
My lead programmer was a cowboy (yeah, he wore the hat and boots) imploding into coke addiction while C++ was being invented and we were emulating it using C. Man, did he write those three-line templates and prototypes for me to fill in.
We were 2 weeks from beta for 18 months and then they fired him. Gave me his job and then hired him back.
My brain broke.
I never coded professionally again.
But they did give me the privilege of driving him to the loony bin. Yep, I literally provided him transportation to the impatient mental health facility. I never saw his sorry ass again. Man, that was SWEET!
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I think it's perfectly clear we're in the wrong band.
(Tori Amos)
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Post #333,514
10/1/10 6:43:53 AM
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I know you didn't mean it but
I got a snicker out of this...
Yep, I literally provided him transportation to the impatient mental health facility.
Pedant humor. Go figure.
I think the single most compelling piece of evidence for global warming is that Fox News viewers think it's a hoax.
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Post #333,553
10/2/10 12:00:18 AM
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Not sure I follow
I totally did mean it.
I do know what "literal" means - I provided the dude with transportation from the ICOM corporate offices to the Milwaukee Mental Health Complex, using my blue Pontiac Grand Am.
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I think it's perfectly clear we're in the wrong band.
(Tori Amos)
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Post #333,554
10/2/10 12:05:13 AM
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Check the word before "mental health facility". :-D
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Post #333,556
10/2/10 12:22:54 AM
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DOH!
I guess I spoke too soon...
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I think it's perfectly clear we're in the wrong band.
(Tori Amos)
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Post #333,516
10/1/10 6:51:34 AM
10/1/10 7:06:23 AM
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Yeah, it's a balance
As I pointed out, the wrong individual is capable of immense damage. To himself and others.
But, hey, you found out you weren't meant to be a programmer. Really. If I saw that guy, I'd consider a great experience. Of course, I ignored C++ (having been a decent C programmer) for 10 years, and then was able avoid it almost completely.
I f'in HATE C++.
I don't totally think it's that guy's fault, blame Bjorn for this one.
Well, and MS-DOS. Really. C and C++ were developed under Unix (C has a chicken vs egg there, but I'll ignore that). Unix had memory protection. Bad pointers are common. VERY common. At least for novice C programmers, and it takes a couple of years of C programming before you correctly think in the language and don't screw up the pointer usage by default.
But that only happens if EVERY time you have a bad pointer, the 1st time it hits, your program crashes and leaves a core dump. You pull it in the debugger, do a stack trace, and you see very quickly the amount of damage you have just done. And it makes you more careful while coding.
This didn't happen to a generation in DOS and early Windows programmers. Bad pointers would merely scribble all over memory, sometime crashing the box, sometimes not, with almost no predictability. A fatal bug could trigger once every thousand runs, with no way to tell when. It was simply accepted that these boxes crash, even when running a simple single program, and might crash in a way that writes all over your hard disk. Most programmers simply did not know about them, and they continued to code, blaming other stuff for any problems.
So after a couple of years of Unix C programming, there is a chance to develop some deep appreciation of the amount of things that can/might/will go wrong. Since the OS killed your program most times it experienced a bad pointer, and forced you to deal with it immediately.
DOS (and then Windows programmers) blamed the OS, the hardware, the (anything but their code), so years later, these groups of programmers are VERY different from each other.
Ok, rant/ramble over.
Edited by crazy
Oct. 1, 2010, 07:06:23 AM EDT
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Post #333,562
10/2/10 5:41:12 AM
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That may be the most lucid explanation yet seen re.
Why Windows VS 'Other' programmers are, at least when faced-off: unable to communicate, almost to the exten of most-any 'political' non-dialogue (since GWB blew up the Empire.)
If you really meant:
Most programmers simply did not know about them, and they continued to code, blaming other stuff for any problems.
Then words fail ... especially in the light of the US Navy (only once, was it?) actually letting NT 'run' one of its minesweepers IIRC.
I mean.. I mean.. was it a Secret that these programmers --even by the date of that fiasco-- Did Not Know that most-all the random, destructive failures were about BAD POINTER (-coding) ??
Scary.. Imagine if your power-brakes were run on C++ eh? never mind the missiles.
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Post #333,569
10/2/10 8:44:58 AM
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mine sweepers, howsabout aircraft carriers?
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 55 years. meep
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Post #333,585
10/2/10 12:16:54 PM
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oh, I meant it
Early NT was great. It brought in memory protection to retrain the programmers.
They fought like HELL. Their Win 3.x and 95 programs would not run, and they spent months before they could release them. Before that point, they'd patch a bug, and ship.
Not anymore: they touched the code, recompiled, and crashed in thousands of places, again and again. They were FURIOUS. And so were their clients. It used to be you could get a bug fix from a responsive windows programmer in a couple of weeks (at least for our systems). We went to NT, and it took months.
The full transition took years, and the entire time was spent trying to blame the chain of code owners, ie: local apps, 3rd part libraries, OS libraries, other apps running on the box, network drivers, video driver, etc.
It settled down, it started to work, NT 3.51 was ROCK SOLID. Dave Cutler RULES! And then they went for video speed, allowed video drivers to crash the box, allowed any code to call the video drivers, and it started again. It never got better. Windows will never be fixed as long as they maintain their ring permission structure.
And windows programmers will always have someone to blame.
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Post #333,606
10/3/10 2:18:09 AM
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..Waiting for other shoe to drop
And, it did:
"Video drivers in Ring ZERO" as in cha. cha. cha.
I guess that really does cover the core of the matter, then.
(See, sometimes we non-programmers even, can grok-to-Fullness what it means to grant full (kernel) ACCESS to an unknown assortment of them 'entrepreneurs with an LLC') -- trying to make their insanely-great new video card hit Mach(o)-1!ONE!! ...and they get in a hurry ... to ship and.. and..
Now all that crap is fucking-Legacy, (I believe is the word for the trap that Redmond never can get out of) / all those aps playing-nice or sometimes not. SO then, IYO (too) -- they really Can't cut that umbilical and start over with a real OS ... ergo, Windows Shall Suck til Redmond dies by 1000 cuts / the death of all the cash-cows, as these end up in some Cloud-thing.
(Sad for the World: that process is already taking Too Long.)
Kinda thought it was (still) that way, but you'd expect --in a new century-- a place with that much purloined cash to have highly paid consultants as might Tell Them. Or maybe that's too dangerous for the consultant wanting a sinecure (?)
Jeez I despise ethics-free bizness, especially when it's almost the only kind around, now. :-/
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Post #333,609
10/3/10 6:52:18 AM
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I saw corp presentations a couple of days ago
The company I'm now working for seems to have been started by a couple of hippies.
The corporate statement on integrity is really idealistic. I like it, but it's not realistic. If you lived by it, you'd live a life of dangerous exposure to the people who don't follow it.
And I think the owners might, so they possibly really believe in it, I'd like to follow it to the letter, but it would be crazy. And I'm not THAT crazy.
Sometimes you just have to keep your mouth shut until specifically asked for your input.
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