We were discussing how we're going to go about creating and marketing a new program which will be deployed on the servers of our clients. When I suggested I be the one to take charge of the program design and creation, and handpick my team of the best programmers in the company to write the code, I was shot down. The reason? They don't want the program to be written correctly. They don't want the code written by people who know what they're doing.
That had me completely flabbergasted. I needed more details. I asked what exactly was wrong with the way I did things? With creating the program properly? Our chief executive in charge of marketing dependability and quick maintenance boiled it down for me.
The problems with me writing the code are as follows:
No matter which language(s) we choose to build the program with, whether it be C++, PHP, C#, or something else, I'm going to make sure we use the classes and functions provided by the language most fit for use in our program. Every single function will be as clear and minimalistic and self contained as possible. And this is evil in terms of dependability and quick maintenance.
If for example we used C# with .NET and I found just the perfect class out of the few thousand provided to fit the job, and it turns out down the line some issue crops up, apparently, they can't complain to Microsoft. Microsoft will tell them no one uses that class, and it is probably buggy, and they'll put it on a todo list to be looked at several months down the line.
If I use any function or class in C++ or PHP outside of the most basic 10-20 ones that dime-a-dozen programmers learn right away, they won't be able to get someone outside our group of professionals to review and fix it.
Basically, they want the program written only using classes, functions, arrays, loops, and the least amount of standard library usage. Because a random programmer most likely will barely be familiar with anything contained within the standard library.
They would prefer reinventing built in functions, and also having them written incorrectly, in terms of output correctness, and running time. Since it means a programmer will never need to look in a manual to be able to understand a piece of code and fix it. Which is important apparently, as most can only figure out what is wrong with the logic directly in front of them, and then try to brute force correct output.
But it doesn't even stop at good code making good use of the language, instead of reinventing the wheel.
Quite often in our existing projects, I go to look at a bug report, and notice some function which works incorrectly, and in the process of fixing it, I condense the logic and make the code much better. Let me give an example.
This is very similar to an existing case we had. The code was as follows:
/*
This function creates a log on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday
It takes as input an integer with a value of 1-7, 1 being Sunday.
*/
void logEveryOtherDay(int dayOfTheWeek)
{
if (dayOfTheWeek == 1)
{
logger.open();
logger.write("Sunday");
logger.dumpData();
logger.close();
}
else if (dayOfTheWeek == 3)
{
logger.open();
logger.write("-------------");
logger.write("Tuesday");
logger.dumpData();
logger.close();
}
else if (dayOfTheWeek == 5)
{
logger.open();
logger.write("-------------");
logger.write("Thursday");
logger.dumpData();
logger.close();
}
}
The problem reported was that logs from Sunday missed the ----- separator before it, and they'd want a log on Saturday too if ran then. When fixing it, the code annoyed me, and I quickly cleaned it to the following:
//This functions takes an integer and returns true if it's odd, and false if even
static bool isOdd(int i) { return(i&1); }
static const char *daysOfTheWeek[] = {
0, //Begin with nothing, as we number the days of the week 1-7
"Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"
}
/*
This function creates a log on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday
It takes as input an integer with a value of 1-7, 1 being Sunday.
*/
void logEveryOtherDay(int dayOfTheWeek)
{
if (isOdd(dayOfTheWeek)) //Logging isn't done on even days
{
logger.open();
logger.write("-------------");
logger.write(daysOfTheWeek(dayOfTheWeek));
logger.dumpData();
logger.close();
}
}
I think it should be obvious my code has much cleaner logic, and should be easy for any reasonable programmer to follow. I frequently do things like this. I even once went to look at a 2000 line function which had roughly a dozen bug reports against it, was a total mess, and ran really really slowly. Instead of hunting for the cause of each issue in it, I decided to scrap it. I created 2 helper functions, one 3 lines, the other 5, and rewrote the body of the function from 2000 lines to roughly 40. Instead of many nested ifs and several loops, we now had a single if and else which did exactly what they needed to, and called one of the two helper functions as needed where the real looping was done. The new function was profiled to run an order of a magnitude faster, and it passed all the test cases we designed, where the original failed a few. It now also contained 2 new features which were sorely lacking from the original. It was now also much easier to read it for correctness, as much less was going on in any section of the code.
But as this executive continued to tell me, what I did on these occasions is evil for an average programmer.
They can't comprehend a small amount of code doing so much. They can't understand what isOdd() does or is trying to do, unless they actually see its source. Its source of "return(i&1);" is just too confusing for them, because they don't know what "&1" means, nor can they comprehend how it can return true or false without containing an elaborate body of code. They can't just take the comment at face value that it does what it says it does. They are also frightened when they review different versions of a file to try to trace a bug when they see a ton of code just disappeared at some point, yet says it does more in the commit log.
So to sum it up, they don't want me, or programmers like me working on any code that is to be deployed on a client's server. When a client from Africa, or South America calls us up with a problem, they don't want to fly one of our good programmers down there to look at it. They want to make sure they can hire someone on site in one of those places to go and look at the problem and fix it quickly. Which apparently can't happen when there's no guarantee of being able to hirer a good programmer there on short notice, and other kinds of programmers can't deal with good code or standard library/class usage.
This mentality makes me very scared, although I guess it does explain to some extent why I find the innards of many rather large open source projects which are used commercially to be filled with tons of spaghetti logic, and written in a manner which suggests the author didn't really know what they were doing, nor should they be allowed to write code.
Anyone experience anything similar? Comments?
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