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Spaghetti code
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Spaghetti code
I like that. May I use it free of charge and without having to give reference?
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Member 15078716 wrote: I like that. May I use it free of charge and without having to give reference?
Certainly, I was not the first to coin this phrase.
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We used that term when I was a student 40+ years ago. And ever since.
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My family hails from Poland (mostly), so I suppose I write meatloaf code - an undifferentiated mass full of unidentifiable bits and pieces. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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well said
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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It was a complicated murder. Lots of moving parts.
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Mike Hankey wrote: Being the detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer.
In my case, the murderer is dead and I'm the victim  .
I have to maintain a large body of code originally written by a guy who deliberately made it excruciating for anyone but himself to maintain. He did this in an effort to make himself indispensable. For over 20 years his supervision was terrified that he would leave.
[long story omitted]
He retired and passed away shortly thereafter. I inherited the great steaming pile left behind.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Not necessarily you. For whatever reason, I was thinking about my career today. Looking back, I was always put into the position to be the guy carrying the pager (back in those days), picking up abandoned/not working applications, etc.
IOW, being responsible for being aware of and fixing bugs/performance problems. While stressful, it made me a much better developer. In such positions, you're exposed to lots of different coding techniques; sometimes, it's "wow, that's a good idea, I should incorporate that more."
Of course, a lot of the time it's, "Wow. This person should be fired."
Some people's purpose in life is to serve as an example. Not necessarily positive.
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Respect for detectives, that assume libraries are quite places where no murder can occur.
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Honey was worried about workload back just before Christmas as documented Here[^]
So is the project done and/or have you made progress?
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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Something must be cooking in that cauldron. Last I've seen it was too hot and she needed a fan. 
Mircea
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I am ahead. I am basically frozen on development waiting for other team members.
So for now I've done my job, and shall remain blameless. 
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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Well done you now have the justification to go out and bust someone's balls for not producing. I always hated having to wait on others, management never seemed to accept that it was the upstream holding things up.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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I'd have to go right to the principal who is cutting the checks, because they keep making the changes. I think they've finally been frozen out, because they're also the one setting the deadlines.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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25% in Maths, 25% in English, 25% in Art, and 25% in Music.
That's 100% - so what's the problem?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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2 years ago I couldn't even spell Engineer and now IR1
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Back in the long ago time, DEC created one of the first rule-based expert systems. The system was used by their sales folks when filling orders for PDP and VAX machines to ensure that the requested configuration included all the components, cables, software, etc. required.
The expert system was called R1.
Software Zen: delete this;
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For years I specialized in DEC equipment, worked on quite a few models, but favorite was the MicroVAX.
Decent machines for the day.
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I did some programming on MicroVax. Pretty cool machine at the time. Amazing OS.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Yeah the OS was a good one, so good;
Quote: And now...the rest of the story: I'll take you on a short tour of NT's lineage, which leads back to Digital and its VMS OS. Most of NT's lead developers, including VMS's chief architect, came from Digital, and their background heavily influenced NT's development. After I talk about NT's roots, I'll discuss the more-than-coincidental similarities between NT and VMS, and how Digital reacted to NT's release.
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JaxCoder.com
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I also had access to a VAX cluster. One could run a program that could be spread across the cluster (network) with the right system calls. Been so long ago, I can't recall the details, but I was fresh out of computer science grad school so the exposure to such a system was quite exciting. Used VMS version of Fortran.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: The system was used by their sales folks when filling orders for PDP and VAX machines to ensure that the requested configuration included all the components, cables, software, etc. required.
In my student days, in the very early 1980s, I was chatting with an architect about computers. She told that their office had just bought one. If you are old enough to remember computers in 1981-82: We made 'graphics' on the line printer from '|' and '-' characters and pixels from white (space) to black (a lot of characters printed on top of each other). Not quite the quality you would like to present in a prospect presented by a large architecture office. So I asked how they used the PC.
They had a floppy disk with the Norwegian Building Standard (or whatever it is called in English - a set of construction requirements that every contractor must adhere to) in a database format, and a second floppy with the dBase executable. Before they made a bid, they had this dBase application go trough it, checking it against the Building Standard to see if the bid included the cost of every single little piece required by the Standard; invariably, they were reminded of things like door stoppers and cabinet door handles that they had overlooked when making the cost calculations for their bid. In the first bid processed by this software, they were reminded of so many such small cost elements that they increased their bid by more than the cost of the computer and all its software - yet, they won the bid. So the PC paid for itself in full through its first job!
I asked the architect what size hard disk they had. No, they had no hard disk. It was a twin floppy system. The specific bid information was stored on the floppy with the dBase software. But ... I said, if you run it on floppies, then you can start the program before you go to lunch, and it might possibly have completed when you come back! The architect gave me a look as if I was from a different planet. Earlier, they did this kind of checks by hand. For a small bid, it might take a man week, for a large project maybe a man month, maybe more. Now it is done automatically in an hour or two, with no manual effort required at all! Why would they worry about that little hour or two?
This was my first real encounter with The Real World (tm) as a computer man, telling me both that students (I still was one) tend to live in an ivory tower, and customer requirements and expectations may be magnitudes away from what we computer guys dream up in our labs. That goes both ways: Both that reduction from one man month to an hour of waiting is great, and the other way around: We can't do wonders. I have referred to this episode dozens of times as my first real step on the road to becoming a true computer professional.
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