{"id":1391,"date":"2007-11-27T08:00:21","date_gmt":"2007-11-27T13:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1391"},"modified":"2007-11-29T07:35:01","modified_gmt":"2007-11-29T12:35:01","slug":"the-evolution-of-a-programmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1391","title":{"rendered":"The Evolution of a Programmer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you have ever written software, then you will most likely find <a href=\"http:\/\/sunsite.nus.edu.sg\/pub\/humour\/prog-evolve.html\">this<\/a> to be funny. Despite the joke on programmers here, I really have made it my goal over the years to write <i>less<\/i> code.  The huge block of code that the &#8220;seasoned professional&#8221; uses to print &#8220;hello world&#8221; actually makes me angry.  I know this is a joke, but I&#8217;ve seen coders who acted this way and I&#8217;m always horrified when I encounter their work.  <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s like having a twenty-page document on how to fill a Pez dispenser. The underlying functionality is simple, but the instructions are so verbose that if you want to make a change you&#8217;re better off dumping the original and writing the whole thing over from scratch.  <\/p>\n<p>In my day job I often work with a large-ish codebase (I&#8217;m gonna guess it&#8217;s somewhere in the ballpark of two or three million lines of code)  which has been around since sometime in 1994.  It&#8217;s crufty now, and once in a while I&#8217;ll need to go into one of the old, dusty corners of the codebase and work on it.  I can often tell who wrote the code just by looking at it.  <\/p>\n<p>Sometimes I&#8217;ll have trouble getting a non-coder superior to understand why we need to throw away (or re-write) a block of functional code when it apparently &#8220;works just fine&#8221; and all we need is &#8220;a minor change&#8221;.  This is particularly true since I&#8217;m reluctant to be critical of my peers and <i>very<\/i> reluctant to be critical of peers which have departed for other jobs.  It&#8217;s a very weasel-ish practice to point the finger of blame at a guy who left two years ago, even if the work he left behind is borderline sabotage.  So I can either blame a guy who isn&#8217;t around to defend himself, or I can act as caretaker for his psychotic, unruly code.  <\/p>\n<p>Not a fun choice to make.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you have ever written software, then you will most likely find this to be funny. Despite the joke on programmers here, I really have made it my goal over the years to write less code. The huge block of code that the &#8220;seasoned professional&#8221; uses to print &#8220;hello world&#8221; actually makes me angry. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[524],"class_list":["post-1391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links","tag-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}