Re: Datasheet-flation?

On Fri, 29 Nov 2024 23:30:59 +0100, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:

On 2024-11-29 16:21, john larkin wrote:

On Thu, 28 Nov 2024 20:42:59 -0700, Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:
 

On 11/28/2024 6:49 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

Do *you* "write for yourself" or "write for others"?
>
I.e., do you write assuming YOU are the Reader?  Or, that
OTHERS will be the Reader?
>
[There seems to be a split on how developers write; I think
this would affect their choice of (spoken) languages as well.]

>
Ah. If I write a script I tend to mix English and Spanish. I tend to use
English thinking of sharing the script or asking questions about it. The places
where I do that are English speaking mostly.

>
I always write for others -- as, if I have to revisit the code
a year or five hence, *I* will effectively BE one of those
"others".

 
Some guy wrote a c program that strips comments from c programs. His
reasoning is that the code speaks for itself, and the comments are
always wrong.

>
Ridiculous.
>

 
I assume that program was not commented.
 
 
I saw a bit of actual Windows source code, and it had a mandatory,
standard comment section at the start of any block of code. It said
 
*/
Author:    Jim Smith
Date:         2018
Purpose:  what it says
/*

>
>
My first job was as programmer for small company. They had tasked an
external programmer with creating a software for them with LabWindows.
This thing creates displays; think a virtual oscilloscope display, for
instance, measuring things like temperature, pressure, rpm, etc. My boss
says "I want you to add a voltage display". Simple.
>
Well, the original programmer had removed the header file that assigned
labels to both the display windows and the code. The code would say
"display_crt(31, A1)", where 31 was the element in the display to
display rpm, for instance. If I inserted "voltage" in the display
window, all the numbers shifted by one, so that 31 became pressure, for
instance.
>
The programmer had sabotaged the code so that no one could touch it by
replacing labels with their values.

I also have a war story: 

In the early 1980s, we had a young programmer who was not getting to
done for some time.  The language was plain C.  She named all the
variables in the pattern AAA, AAB, AAC, and so on.  No comments of
course.   Nobody could figure out what she was doing, so I was
eventually asked to figure out what was going on.  So I talked to her
and reverse engineered her code, generating a big flow chart in the
process. 

It was apparent that the approach was completely wrong, and far more
complex than needed.  My instinct is that she didn't know how to do
whatever it did (I no longer remember), and so was playing for time,
which worked until it didn't.  She was reassigned.  If she had asked
for help, she would have been OK.

It took me months to recreate the header file with labels. My boss
thought I was useless: it is difficult to explain this to a non programmer.
>
I carefully documented since then every program I wrote. I did not want
any other person to suffer what I did.

Yeah.

Joe Gwinn