From: Brian Wisti <brianwisti@...>
Date: 2004-10-15T03:28:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Eating sandwiches in the park


--- Eivind Eklund <eeklund@gmail.com> wrote:
> Examples:
> - Perl, where the interpreter design and language is just icky, but
> I've had to deal with it because there are applications/modules my
> employer needs to work
> - MySQL, where a migration is too expensive
> - The NFS code for FreeBSD, where we had a spaghetti of C macros
> making the code almost impossible to deal with, but cleaning it up
> would result in divergence from NetBSD/OpenBSD so we had less
> bugfixes.
> - Donald Becker's ethernet drivers in Linux - the code was fairly
> horrible, but they were the only source of some functionality.
> - A million lines of C++ code in various styles and for various
> projects at a former employer, where I did troubleshooting and ended
> up debugging many of the "funny" problems that the people that had
> written the code couldn't debug themselves.
> 
> If you don't have to deal with other people's bad choices on a daily
> basis, you live a sheltered life.
> 

Sorry, I committed an error of omission with my message. I was
specifically talking about my Ruby experiences. The Ruby community has
been a bit more sane than a lot of other coders. Thinking of why_, I'll
need to modify that. The Ruby community may be insane, but so far it's
insane in a manner that fits in very nicely with keeping your fellow
coders happy.

My Perl/SQL/etcetera experiences were bumpy from the first time that I
had to read somebody else's code, and have continued to be on an almost
daily basis. I haven't had that yet with Ruby.

(knock on wood)

Kind Regards,

Brian Wisti
http://coolnamehere.com/