Re: 'Nuther Programming Challenge

On 4/2/25 13:19, c186282 wrote:

On 4/2/25 7:16 AM, Farley Flud wrote:

To get a taste of creating a program that implements government
procedures, I challenge all to write a C function (or the equivalent
in some other language) to calculate the federal withholding tax.
>
The procedures are spelled out here:
>
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15t.pdf
>
Don't forget that we are dealing with MONEY, i.e. BIG BUCKS.
Therefore, the use of decimal floating point according to
IEEE 754-2008 is required:
>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008_revision
>
>
So get going!
>
If you get stuck just contact know-it-all rblowman.  He is
a personal associate of Elon Musk.
>
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

    HA HA HA ! That's what so few seem to GET !
   Huge, old, govt bureaucracy with a mass of
   rules tweaked and re-tweaked to please various
   pols and pressure groups. You need a good CPA
   or dedicated student at minimum to kind-of
   understand it.
    PROBABLY similar issues in the UK/EU.
    Oh, and it's always 'Kind Of' - even the
   agencies themselves don't know how all the
   rules work out anymore. SSA - awful.

A lot of the times the rules were made up by software developers, and then became the official definition.
You sit in front of a half-arsed spec see some ambiguity, flip a coin, and code up your arbitrary interpretation.
The real amusing thing is if you go back to the same company a decade later, ask them to explain the rules, and you find an impressive, but bogus, rationale has been constructed to justify why the code works the way it does. Why your arbitrary decision was right.
But yes, people do underestimate the huge amount of complexity in old systems. That complexity may be unnecessary, but it takes a huge amount of time to understand it and simplify it. Plus, you don't get credit for the skill and effort.
Develop a fancy mathematical algorithm, and you are a genius, even if it is orders of magnitude easier to do. Hence, career wise, I quickly made it my mission to stay away from old code bases.
  IRS,

   way way beyond awful. AM hoping Trump nukes
   the existing IRS. A new, plain, deal is now
   BADLY needed. The bureaucracy was bad enough,
   but all the 'fixes' created by pols and their
   favorite donors ..... !!!