Friday, September 15, 2006

Incoherent Ranting...

So I've been re-acquainting myself with The Daily WTF. Ah, classic anecdotes of the finest Darwin-esque behavior as exhibited by self-proclaimed "software developers". Personally, I've devoured an uncountable number of tomes about the art in software development; likewise with respect to the craft within the same. I've disassociated myself from code and seen systems from a God's-eye view..

Uh, I guess they call doing stuff like disassociating oneself from implementation details "abstraction", although I never quite understood the applicability of the word. To me, abstract == oil-on-canvas "paintings" produced by drunken, self-proclaimed "arteests" in a fit of psychological self-molestation; not some shrunken-head, metaphorical representation of some intangible thing consisting of many smaller parts, in turn which consist of more, ever-smaller (yet in some deranged sense, 'logically related') parts, nested deeper and deeper, eventually reaching a scale analogous to the quarks of quantum psychics, ad infinitum...

...the complexity of which, in many cases, is enough to turn even the most salted codemonkey into a drooling, babbling fool with a nice heaping tub of tapioca pudding between the ears.

Now, as to how these sorts of intellectual land-mines ever make their way out of the bedroom/basement of some prepubescent/post-pubescent adolescent... okay, enough of that. You want it straight? It fucking amazes me that some of the utter turds passed off as software systems that I've had the misfortune to encounter have ever seen the light of day, much less the crack of the asshole that spawned them.

What?

An example? You want a fucking example?! Ugh.

Fine, then; pick a layer, any layer..

The Data Layer
  • Loosely typed database schemas having predominantlyimplicit relationships, manipulated via an untyped scripting language (vis a vis VBScript!).
The "Business Logic" Layer
  • Business logic is handled by the UI (except what the stuff we accidentally coded into the database [the details of which I don't remember in the slightest]), so I guess we don't technically have a "logic layer", per se...
The "User Interface"
  • Wtf? Just ask anybody who's had to write a user-input validation library from the ground up... you can BDUF until you're blue in the face, and the users will always find a way to fuck it up!!
By the way, were you aware that there are only two industries on the planet that refer to the consumers of their wares as "users"? Yep. Wanna know which industries? Well, one is pretty easy...

  1. Computers, and
  2. Hard drugs.
Just something to ponder...

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot:

</GRIPE>

2 comments:

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