Hell Oh Entropy!

I've enjoyed ripping code apart and fixing things myself for the past couple of years, in my day job as well as while hacking on ayttm/antidialer. But now there's a new challenge that has been facing me at work for the past few weeks.

For the past weeks I've had to monitor and mentor programmers. Which means that I have to watch 'trained' Computer Engineers struggle with basic programming -- like refactoring code (renaming a variable, for the uninitiated) or even reading and trying to understand the code. Someone with just under 2 years of experience in my project doesn't know how the programs he/she writes is built. Ask him/her what compiler is used and they'll tell you the name of the wrapping build script. We intentionally slow down our code so that the dealers can get the satisfaction of defeating a computer in computations -- we call these speed breakers as coding standards.

We use VSS for SCM... no, that's not the worst. We don't even know how to use it. We create a new folder (a branch for us CVSers) for every new revision and then embark on an hour long 'configuration' activity which includes creating configuration files and copying our code on to another server which ultimately acts as our repository. Heh, when one checks out and checks in code, it is termed as malpractice ;)

In short, we have our own little brain-dead SCM on top of another SCM. Why? Well that's because someone told our boss that VSS corrupts itself after some 2-3 GB of data. So to keep things trim, we delete old versions of code (so much for configuration management eh) to ensure that code doesn't become corrupt. So why don't we use CVS/SVN/Git instead? Well it's because the team of computer engineers would find it difficult to use, as opposed to an hour long, error prone, and absolutely mundane configuration activity. Give me 'cvs commit' anytime.

Also, I've been wondering what would best describe the code that I have been working on for the past few years at work. Here's a try at it:

The code is not really difficult, just a lot of Hell-Oh-World-like snippets written in an illegible 'programming standard' to make it difficult to read (someone called it code security once) and then built together into completely unrelated modules so that adding another component would mean ripping ones arm off.

I think I've digressed...