Despicable People

Every place I worked had a different culture. I found this interesting and, when the conditions are proper, very entertaining. The workplace culture is something that can strongly motivate you, something that makes you feel part of something unique that’s happening right here and now.

When I worked at Ubisoft I collected all the jargon we used in a dictionary.

My current job is not different. During the years, recurring rants and complains made my friend Francesco and I create a list of despicable types of people. You know when you see something in the code that it is not just right or some approach to the problem that you consider plainly wrong? That’s the base idea. Then take into account other colleagues that have strong ideas about what is Holy and what is Evil and you get lot of jokes only you and your team can understand.

So the list has a split nature, half a satire against Absolute Truth and half a complain against those who write code for a living, but are not Real Programmers. That’s how this ever groving list of wrongdoers came together.

Here are our current list. It is very nerdy and most pun and jokes are likely difficult to catch even if you are a seasoned programmer, so I will offer a decoding table at the end of the post. Ready? Let the rant begin?

Despicable types of people (in no particular order)

  1. those who don’t do a memset at the beginning of each function
  2. those who define nonsense operators
  3. those who start counting from 1
  4. [C++] those who pass references without const modifier even when they do not change the argument
  5. [C++] those who don’t place const in the signature of methods that don’t change the status of the instance
  6. [C++] those who use delete without [] to free an array
  7. those who don’t program in C
  8. those who don’t use Windows XP
  9. those who use the very same logging message in several lines of their code
  10. [C++] those who do delete this with no reason
  11. those who don’t know Z80 assembly
  12. those who don’t remove every warning from their code
  13. those who check in an if condition if a boolean variable is == true in languages where booleans can only be true or false
  14. those who name variables and functions in a language but English
  15. those who use DBs
  16. those who create animations using .obj files
  17. those who punctuate randomly
  18. those who pronounce acronyms half in Italian and half in English
  19. those who write programs that exceed 48k RAM.

So here is a little analysis/explanation

1 This means “to perform a memset of the variables on the stack, so that everything is initialized in a function before doing actual work”. Therefore this belongs to a sort of self defensive programming approach – trust no one, yourself included (after all who is going to use the variables freshly created on the stack?).

  1. It is aimed mostly at languages where you can redefine operators – C++ and Scala. In Scala you can define every sequence of symbols as a custom operator. Usually this is utterly confusing for beginners and everyone that is not fluent with the library the defines such operators. Personally I find DSL a messy confusion that brings no real advantage for at least two reason – first you know the host language but you need to learn the DSL that has different syntax/semantic and then the DSL forces the “host language” but has to comply with it and this results in odd looking syntax, misleading punctuation or phrasing. I much prefer a traditional library with a possibly well defined interface to Vulcan gibberish such as :::, |–>, ~>.

  2. How many times have you found code where the programmer started counting from 1, even if the language was C? This is annoying because there are very good reasons to start from 0… but someone prefers to ignore them and sticks with medieval culture lacking the concept of zero.

4,5. In C++ (and to a lesser extent in C) you can enforce a type checking strategy called const-correctness. Basically this strategy marks data that is expected to stay constant through-out some operation. This helps in writing better code because the user programmer can make stronger assumptions. Unfortunately you can’t use non const-correct code from const-correct code (and possibly this is why Java has no const-correctness concept) so the lazy programmer prefers to ignore the whole issue.

  1. This is a plain bug, because delete new int[10] is undefined behavior as per C++ standard. Nonetheless poorly written (and tested) code has such patterns.

7, 8 and 15 are basically exaggerations of what some people with Absolute Truth assert. Taken out of their contexts these sentences sound even more absurd, but the meaning is “simple and tested systems tend to be more reliable than complex and new ones”.

  1. Logging is helpful to get insights on the sequence of operations inside a running software. If you replicate the very same text then it is quite hard to figure out what the executed sequence was. This is plain dumb.
  2. Deleting this in C++ can be colorfully depicted as cutting the branch on which you are sitting. This is something that usually you don’t want to do. If you find yourself needing this it is likely that you are approaching the problem from a wrong perspective. Seldom this operation is correct.

  3. Z80 CPU was a popular microprocessor back in the 80s. Programming in Z80 assembly was easy, surely easier than programming the 6502, another popular micro of the same years. This point is another overstatement that refers back to a Golden Age where everything was proper and sound.

  4. Compiler warning, most of the times, are just picky annoyance, not much different than a crooked picture on the wall. Sometimes they are actually errors – the intention of the programmer was not caught by the lines he wrote and some subtleties were detected and reported by the compiler. This is one of the reasons why you want zero warnings when compiling your code. The other reason is that if your output space is cluttered by harmless warnings hardly you will notice the dangerous one.

  5. When a programmer is insecure of the language she/he is programming in, the first thing that she/he should do is to study the language rather than writing code with it. Adding redundant or useless structures (such as this – comparing with true) is a clear sign of doubt and uncertainty and usually it appears in code with below average quality.

  6. As many programmers I like tidy and well sorted out thing (even if my desk could tell a different story to the casual observer). Programming languages (at least most of the commonly used ones) have English keywords. So, yes the official reason is that your code should be read internationally, the real reason is that mixed language code looks really ugly.

  7. See 7.

  8. Once upon a time you made animations by playing different images (frames) one after another at a given speed. This worked fine, but the production was labor intensive. Obj files contains static 3D model, so in order to play them you need to perform a lot of data transfer to the graphics adapter. New techniques based on morphing and skeletal deformations arose in the years so that animations can be created with less data production and transferring, and – more important – can be optimized by the 3D accelerator. Making an animation with objs means that you miss where the bottlenecks in the graphics pipeline are, together with a good part of the last decades in 3D technology.

  9. Code punctuation is used to separate stuff. Keeping a consistent punctuation style (i.e. relative position between spaces, parenthesis, commas and the likes) is a good habit, is good manner to those who will read it and shows that you care for your code. And if you don’t care about your code, then you don’t care about your work, and don’t care about who is going to read your code, then you are despicable.

  10. This is much like 14. Italian programmers (but I guess that this is shared by all non English native programmers), while speaking, mix Italian and English words in the same sentence. This is fine because quite often technical documentation is written in English and for many terms there are no Italian equivalents. Pronouncing an acronym half in Italian and half in English is something that tells about the English knowledge of the speaker and his/her desire to show off with unfamiliar buzzwords.

  11. 48K RAM was the memory size of the ZX Spectrum a popular home computer back in the 80s. This is much on the line of point 7, 8 and 15 – a simple system tends to be more reliable than a complex one. There are also some implications about how lazy programmers are that are no longer willing to spend time in doing their homework (optimization) and waste memory and CPU for no good reason.

There are basically two main interesting ideas: the love for the code, meaning the care for your craft, and that simpler is better. I am not sure I actually heard the sentence “this code hasn’t received enough love” referring to a ugly or messy source file, but that’s the care idea. What I wrote above is true – if you don’t care for the details, why should you care for less evident characteristics?

Simpler is better, though put a little dramatically on the list, is not a new concept. KISS principle is also called. No sane programmer is going to oppose this, on the other hand it has to be balanced with development time. Programmers that uses more than 48k are not lazy, but have deadlines to hit.

The list is over, but we’re still looking for wrongdoers to add. Have you any suggestion?

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