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Someone got caught in my local supermarket yesterday who was in front of me in the queue for free coffee.
They got their free coffee, and on the way out half-inched a packet of biscuits.
Bare-faced cheek.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Fortunately, the frustration is not over my own code, but rather like slight head shaking: Haven't we programmers yet learnt how design managable software? Sometimes it looks as if we haven't.
I was blessed with a Java stack dump from our Bamboo client (continous integration software), 260 levels deep!
How can anyone either design or maintain software that goes into 260 levels of function call within function call within function call within... ??
OK, in the old days of console user interfaces and single-threaded programming, everything initiated from the keyboard, properly terminated by a Carriage Return, such code is at least imaginable. But we are talking about a presumbaly modern, web browser based, event driven system. You operate on a data model which is in some sort of consistent state. Something happens (i.e. an event), causing some sort of change to the model, leaving it in a new, consistent state.
Well, of course sometimes a transitions from one consistent state to another may be complex (and so time consuming that users complain about the responsiveness of the application), but neverhteless: How can anyone create a transition that goes 260 levels deep in nested function calls to handle the event?
I have been programming since 1975, but I have never, ever, encountered any sort of reasonable program solution that calls 260 levels deep to handle an event. Not even recursive solutions. (There is nothing in the stack dump suggesting anything like failed recursion control.)
Or is it just me not known what Real Software is all about?
I've seen Fortran code that broke the compiler's limit of 99 arguments to a function. I have worked with software where the largest struct definition was 8300 lines long. I have seen some Real Code in my career. Yet I am happy that I am not the one to try to analyze a stack dump of 260 levels.
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Member 7989122 wrote: Not even recursive solutions. (There is nothing in the stack dump suggesting anything like failed recursion control.)
I'd bet it must be something like this, I cannot imagine that deep such deep a call level being expected without something going wrong somewhere.
Mwwaweawawaaaa. Java. Nevermind.
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Entropy isn't what it used to.
modified 18-Jun-14 6:12am.
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Rage wrote: I cannot imagine that deep such deep a call level being expected without something going wrong somewhere.
Why not? It's Java...
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fixed.
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Entropy isn't what it used to.
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Member 7989122 wrote: I've seen Fortran code that broke the compiler's limit of 99 arguments to a function. I have worked with software where the largest struct definition was 8300 lines long. I have seen some Real Code in my career. Yet I am happy that I am not the one to try to analyze a stack dump of 260 levels.
Way back I needed to add a simple if statement to handle a simple condition. My if was at the same level as a bunch of other if's but Microsoft C 5.1 said I had "nested too deep for the compiler". I had the "opportunity" (we had to speak in proactive words back then) to rewrite that code because the bug had to be fixed. Hideous spaghetti affair with goto's. Not just goto backward in the code but goto forwards as well. Printed it out on 15 feet of green bar paper and used colored pencils to delineate all the different sections.
Why did I feel smarter back then than I do now? Delphi and C# have made me feel less knowledgeable about the code.
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The craziest code I ever saw was written using the Fortran "RETURN k" mechanism: You could supply one or more labels as an argument to a function. If a statement like "RETURN 4" was executed, control returned to the caller, not at the line following the call, but at the label supplied as argument #4 to the function.
When we were students, way back in 1978-79, a popular kind of puzzle was a set of four plastic cubes with differently colored sides. The problem was to make a row of them so that all tne top four sides were red, the four front sides white, the bottom sides blue, and the sides on the back green. (Or whatever colors - four like-colored sides in a row, all the way around.) A progamming exercize to teach backtracking was to generate instructions on how to rotate the four cubes to create a solution.
My classmade solved this in something like 40 lines of Fortran (which did not allow recursion! "Classical" Fortran didn't need a stack), where the core of his logic was eight calls to ROTATE(...). Each of the eight calls was labeled, and six of the arguments to ROTATE were labels of other ROTATE calls (or to itself, repeating the call). The logic of the ROTATE function was essentially a sequence of tests, each ending up in a "RETURN 3" to "RETURN 8" (the first to arguments carried the current state), a few of the cases causing one line of instructions to be printed.
When this code was run, the only thing you would know in advance was that the textually first ROTATE call was the first to be executed. The only way to know which would be next was to analyze the ROTATE logic for given values of the first two parameters - it could be from any of the six labels in the argument list; there was no way to tell without knowing the input values.
My classmate's solution did work. A few months later I asked him to explain the logic behind it. He made a serious try, but had to give up: The code he had written himself, only a few months earlier, made no sense at all to him. His own code was like Greek to him. (If I meet him, I'll ask if he deep in his archives have got that piece of code - I'd like to see it again!)
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Doesn't sound right unless it ends with thousand.
Simon Lee Shugar (Software Developer)
www.simonshugar.co.uk
"If something goes by a false name, would it mean that thing is fake? False by nature?" By Gilbert Durandil
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"Confused old German fellows with model deposit.(8)"
Nice and simple today
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur .
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Is it Faulty Towers, "Don't mention the war" episode?
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Movie Quote Of The Day
Mother, just because I wear trakkies and play sport does not make me a lesbian!
Which movie?
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Every Mother's Worst Fear[^]? 
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
-----
The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
-----
I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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I won't get this wrong!
This is my movie! 
Don't mind those people who say you're not HOT. At least you know you're COOL.
I'm not afraid of falling, I'm afraid of the sudden stop at the end of the fall! - Richard Andrew x64
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You're a film star?
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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Considering it.
Don't mind those people who say you're not HOT. At least you know you're COOL.
I'm not afraid of falling, I'm afraid of the sudden stop at the end of the fall! - Richard Andrew x64
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Yes... I was considering receiving a large sum of money, but It seems that I have change my mind about that
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I bet you're not a film star then. 
Don't mind those people who say you're not HOT. At least you know you're COOL.
I'm not afraid of falling, I'm afraid of the sudden stop at the end of the fall! - Richard Andrew x64
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... or a lesbian ... 
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Entropy isn't what it used to.
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I am steering well clear of that discussion!
I don't know the lady, and her personal choices would be none of my business anyway.
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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OriginalGriff wrote: well
well well well[^]
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Entropy isn't what it used to.
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Hmmmm.... It's hard being a straight lady if you grow up surrounded with so many guys in the family (My mom is the only daughter of my grandmom and I'm the only daughter of my mom).
But, I am not a lesbian.
Don't mind those people who say you're not HOT. At least you know you're COOL.
I'm not afraid of falling, I'm afraid of the sudden stop at the end of the fall! - Richard Andrew x64
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This one[^]?
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
-----
The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
-----
I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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The Billy Jean King Story.
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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