Re: Tell about worst practices you have seen...
From: Saga (antiSpam_at_somewhere.com)
Date: 07/30/04
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Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 11:14:38 -0500
Now you made me remember of a similar issue.
Back in the 80's when every year was supposed to be the year
of the LAN, a friend of mine was working on a program that
initialized the LAN environment. IIRC, it used MS NET.
The connection time took about 10 seconds, so he spent a day
making this progress bar thingy that had a line of dot grow each
second, beeoing every 5 seconds or so. He wa also quite proud
of his accomplishment and I thought it looked really cool and
was quite useful in telling the user that something was going on.
When he showed to it the manager/president/owner of the
company he said something along the lines of "what the hell is
that?!! get rid of it!"
It took my friend dozens of therapy sessions to get over that ;-)
(just kidding!)
Still, it is frustrating when we go out of our way to give that extra
mile and it isn't appreciated!
Saga
"Ralph" <nt_consulting32@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:OFmnGNedEHA.3528@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
>
> "Russ Holsclaw" <russ@holsclaw.nyet> wrote in message
> news:eBrzjXcdEHA.1656@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
> > > > here's one we should **never** forget.
> > > >
> > >
> >
>
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=%23zoQRV%24yCHA.1132%40TK2MSFTNGP10
> > >
> > > Do you think it was a troll? The original poster never responded.
> >
> > It's hard to say, isn't it?
> >
> > Back in the early '70s, when I was working for IBM during the
"golden age
> > of the mainframe", I heard a story about a programmer who did
something
> > that sounds like the guy that started that thread. This wasn't just
an
> > ordinary programmer, this was someone with an "IBM Fellowship", a
presumed
> > programming genius who was supposedly able to walk on water, and had
vast
> > resources at his beck and call.
> >
> > I heard the story third-hand, so it may be somewhat apocryphal, but
the
> IBM
> > Fellow in question was allegedly Ken Iverson, the inventor of the
APL
> > language. APL was a clever piece of work, but takes the prize for
being
> the
> > most difficult code to read anywhere, due to its use of a special
> character
> > set containing a rich collection of strange-looking symbols, each of
which
> > was an operator of some sort.
> >
> > Anyway, whoever it was, the "genius" was not very good with
mainframe
> > assembler (IBM System/360). Once, he had to write a simple routine
to
> > zero-out a memory buffer of some 4K bytes. According to the legend,
he was
> > in a hurry, so he wrote it himself, instead of handing the job to an
> > underling.
> >
> > Instead of writing a loop of any kind, he is said to have written a
> routine
> > consisting of 4096 consecutive "Move-Immediate" instructions, each
one
> > setting a single byte to zero. This would have looked something
like
> this:
> >
> > MVI BUFFER,0
> > MVI BUFFER+1,0
> > MVI BUFFER+2,0
> > .
> > .
> > .
> > MVI BUFFER+4094,0
> > MVI BUFFER+4095,0
> >
> > Supposedly, the guy was dead serious. One of his underling staffers
> > replaced the code with a short routine that did the job properly.
(The
> IBM
> > 360 systems had one instruction that could zero out 256 bytes in one
line
> > of code ... putting this into a loop was trivial. Since this is a VB
> > newsgroup, I'll spare you any more details. This code was from the
> > punched-card era, so the guy punched each instruction onto a punched
card,
> > on a keypunch machine. It would have required a little more than 2
full
> > boxes of cards.)
> >
> > On hearing this, I asked my manager where I could sign up to be an
IBM
> > Fellow. He wasn't amused.
> >
> > Perhaps the guy with the 2MB VB subroutine was trying to do
something
> > similar, and just couldn't imagine a more efficient way of doing it.
> > Perhaps he was loading an array up with some enormous table full of
> > constant values. Who knows?
> >
>
> You can also "error" in the opposite direction as well.
>
> In the late '80s I took an PC/msdos assignment with a company to help
pay
> the rent. As I was a REAL unix programmer, I viewed the entire project
with
> haughty contempt, but was also eager to please. Proverty does that to
one.
>
> They had this PC off to the side and its job was every ten seconds to
FTP
> down a file from a mainframe and launch another program to massage it.
My
> actual assignment was to rework some of the massaging. While looking
at the
> code I noticed with some horror the ugly little program they were
using to
> count down the 10 seconds - it used huge loops, inefficient time/date
> processing, ugly output. So I sat down and re-wrote it - condensing it
down
> to just a couple of lines of compact elegant C code, with cool output
and a
> beautiful twirling cursor.
>
> I was very, very proud of my effort and quickly showed it to my
supervisor.
> He merely looked at me and said something like - "Let me get this
straight.
> You spent the day, making a program on a single task box, that waits
for 10
> seconds, run faster?"
>
> He kept giving me strange looks during the duration of the project.
>
> -ralph
>
>
>
- Next message: Tim Baur: "Re: Error Handling"
- Previous message: Rod: "Re: Getting a "Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server" error message, and cannot figure out why"
- Maybe in reply to: AustinMN: "Tell about worst practices you have seen..."
- Next in thread: Rick Rothstein: "Re: Tell about worst practices you have seen..."
- Reply: Rick Rothstein: "Re: Tell about worst practices you have seen..."
- Reply: Al Meadows: "Re: Tell about worst practices you have seen..."
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