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Great, so now he's teaching his brand of programming to the next generation of Indian programmers.
More job security for the west then. Brillant.
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No, that'd be IIT. ITT is a US tech school (2 year degrees) chain.
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall
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Ah my bad. easy mistakea-to-makea.
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maizhiming wrote: aren't even valid XML
You mean not well-formed?
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Here is an example:
<Stagenumber="0" minaw="0.1" maxaw="0.8" desorpFr="300" adsorpFr="300" used="true"/>
I didn't know elements could have values. Well they can't. XML viewers won't even read it.
You should see the code that parses this. It is pretty much one gigantic function that reads in the file character by character.
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Maybe he was really writing an SGML parser instead, and just got confused on the extension. 
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall
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Thank goodness I didn't get my programming degree at ITT Tech!
I went there for CADD and Electronics Engineering instead. 
Imagine that you are hired to build a bridge over a river which gets slightly wider every day; sometimes it shrinks but nobody can predict when. Your client provides no concrete or steel, only timber and cut stone (but they won't tell you what kind). The coefficient of gravity changes randomly from hour to hour, as does the viscosity of air. Your only tools are a hacksaw, a chainsaw, a rubber mallet, and a length of rope.
Welcome to my world.
-Me explaining my job to an engineer
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maizhiming wrote: There isn't a single pass by reference in the entire application. It is all pointers.
This one I don't get. The only thing references give you, is a nicer syntax for objects of classes with overloaded operators. A reference is just a shorthand notation for *ptr. And by the sound of it, it sounds like the code is based off of some legacy C code.
maizhiming wrote: catch(...)
Now that one's just plain horrible. That one will catch anything. Stuff that ought to be handled by Dr Watson, or at the very least terminate the program in some graceful way.
maizhiming wrote: Oddly enough, he wasn't let go for incompetence.
Have you worked long where you work now? Maybe you should take a long hard look at the time ahead of you before the probation time is over (assuming you have a probation period of your employment). Maybe they (your boss(es)) couldn't see his incompetence because of their own?
--
Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
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Alright, so I'm young and new to programming in general and that kind of made me puke in my mouth a little bit. I guess I get to thank my lucky stars that I have 1 of probably 5 really great programmers (of close to 40) in my shop as my immediate supervisor. People here call him the .NET daddy.
But yeah, I guess I'm not going to ITT Tech for my degree...
maizhiming wrote: Oddly enough, he wasn't let go for incompetence.
It really seems to be the trend (at least that I've seen). The incompetent programmers work at the same place for more than a few years while the good ones move around and inherit the atrocities that these "career" guys build. I cringe every time one of the guys from management comes over to see what we're doing and starts making suggestions. It's like "please oh please don't make me do that..." 
"The shortest distance between two points is under construction"
-Noelie ALtito
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AeonBlue wrote: It really seems to be the trend (at least that I've seen). The incompetent programmers work at the same place for more than a few years while the good ones move around and inherit the atrocities that these "career" guys build. I cringe every time one of the guys from management comes over to see what we're doing and starts making suggestions. It's like "please oh please don't make me do that..."
But, just once in a blue moon, a great team comes together and a bunch of great people churn productively for years. It's a rare mythical beasty to be sure. But it does happen now and then.
I'm largely language agnostic
After a while they all bug me 
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I'd insult the guy, but i made some terrible code when i was just starting.. (actually i'm still new, but my code has improved significantly.. still has a ways to go though, will never be perfect) so I wouldn't completely throw away the idea that he's a bad teacher now. Hell i'd bet he learned a lot from writing that crappy app  looks like he had the opportunity to make plenty of mistakes.
Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
-Fred Brooks
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I failed to mention that this application was developed over the past 4 years by this guy. He is 50+ years old and is a part-time ITT Tech teacher; a job that he was doing while he worked here and I think still is doing. I don't know what he teaches but I think he has a CS degree.
I don't know how many years experience he has in the industry. It could be that this was his first C++ app though. He obviously is or was a C programmer at some point in time.
This week I removed 20,000+ lines of redundant and unnecessary code from the program. CODE, not comments. And I am just getting started. I have to add functionality to it now.
I spend half my time writing new C# code and the other half maintaining the legacy stuff. It makes me cry every time I close Visual Studio 2008 and open Borland Studio 2006  .
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Any chance of being able to pull the Borland libraries into VS2k8, or does the app take excess advantage of Borlands proprietary language extensions?
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots.
-- Robert Royall
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"He wasn't let go for incompetance."
Try explaining why all the stuff you laid out is incompetent to labour courts. You also find that most of these lecturers really don't have a clue of real-world stuff (most, not all). One of my lectures recently wrote a book on design patterns in C#: she made an entire chapter on the observer pattern. Yep, freaken observer pattern in C# - I'll stick to events thank you very much and save myself a few classes every time I want to handle a click event. And she was the head of department. And the book was about C# 3.0 (you would think they would catch a wiff of the multicast delegate by that stage!).
By the way, a lot of the more influential folks in CS are giving universities a wrap lately (don't have any specific references.) for pushing out incompetant graduates: I left my first university after getting 70% plus for all my CS subjects without ever attending classes or studying (guess where that lecturer lectured?).
He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who does not ask a question remains a fool forever. [Chineese Proverb]
Jonathan C Dickinson (C# Software Engineer)
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Wow! Now that is a real coding horror! Five.
To me it sounds like an in-house app. I would really consider migrating the existing database to standard XML format, to be able to use a standard parser.
maizhiming wrote: There isn't a single pass by reference in the entire application. It is all pointers.
Also, like the guy above, I do not get the big problem od refrences vs. pointers. Of course const references are the most proper way in many cases, but IMO using pointers is not a horror, compared to the rest of the stuff you mention.
_____________________________________
Action without thought is not action
Action without emotion is not life
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LOL Well, I graduated from ITT Tech in Seattle, WA in 1997. Hopefully, the code you're talking about above did not come from anyone tought by my professor. He was very strict on proper code practice, and placing things where they truly belong. However, I seemed to be the only guy there, besides my professor, who seemed to get it, so your post doesn't surprise me in the slightest. 
Kyosa Jamie Nordmeyer - Taekwondo Yi (2nd) Dan
Portland, Oregon, USA
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At my last job I had to work a such a mess except it was in VB6. The original programmer was clueless. It had Global variables all over the place. There were no arguments passed to any methods ever! Everything was a variable in a larger scope. And this was the core software for the entire business. 100 people used this every day.
I remember one section of code that had to import a bunch of records. It read a file line by line and inserted the records into the table with SQL (of course it didn't reference the columns so you can never add any columns to the table). On top of that it execute a select count(*) from tbl after each insert to display the count on the screen. It would take forever and the users would be complaining about the slow speed of the program.
I started looking for another job on my first day of work because I got 40 emails about problems with the program. Fortunately I was only there for about 6 weeks. What's funny is that I purposely did not put VB6 anywhere on my resume, not did I mention it in the interview because I HATE programming VB6. Yet they expected me to work on a VB6 application.
I didn't get any requirements for the signature
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I used to work at a place where many of those things were done and no one saw anything wrong with it.
I switched to a better job.
Bill W
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Any database table with a 1,000 columns should be flagged for restructuring. That is indeed a horror.
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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Any database table with a 1,000 columns should be flagged for restructuring deletion.
Simon
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Yes, and also terminate the database architect who came up with the idea.
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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This is surely worse than the database of 991 tables that I am looking at....
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darkelv wrote: the database of 991 tables that I am looking at....
Wow, there is also a summary table, I suppose.
If the Lord God Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon the Creation, I would have recommended something simpler.
-- Alfonso the Wise, 13th Century King of Castile.
This is going on my arrogant assumptions. You may have a superb reason why I'm completely wrong.
-- Iain Clarke
[My articles]
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In my system, each participant is a row, and each response is a column.
I think he confuses relational databases with excel sheets 
modified 12-Sep-18 21:01pm.
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