Brain the size of a planet, and working with MC Hammer



  • I'm fed up of being expected to maintain someone else's mess with MC Hammer managing me.

    If I didn't write it, and can't rewrite it, I won't maintain it. Simples.

     


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Cbuttius said:

    I'm fed up of being expected to maintain someone else's mess with MC Hammer managing me.

    If I didn't write it, and can't rewrite it, I won't maintain it. Simples.

     

    So, find another job. Or is there something about your personaility that makes it so you are unable to resign from your position?

     



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    So, find another job. Or is there something about your personaility that makes it so you are unable to resign from your position?

     


    Probably the same thing that's keeping me at my job, an intense desire to not be homeless.



  • @CodeNinja said:

    @Lorne Kates said:
    So, find another job. Or is there something about your personaility that makes it so you are unable to resign from your position?

    Probably the same thing that's keeping me at my job, an intense desire to not be homeless.
    True story: I once went to the grocery store and they didn't accept pride as a form of payment.  Assholes!



  • @Cbuttius said:

    I'm fed up of being expected to maintain someone else's mess with MC Hammer managing me.

    If I didn't write it, and can't rewrite it, I won't maintain it. Simples.

     So, the WTF is you?

     



  • @Cbuttius said:

    If I didn't write it, and can't rewrite it, I won't maintain it. Simples.
     

    lol



  • @Cbuttius said:

    I'm fed up of being expected to maintain someone else's mess with MC Hammer managing me.

    If I didn't write it, and can't rewrite it, I won't maintain it. Simples.

    I feel your pain, and I suspect many of the other folks in this forum do as well, but saying: "hey, I'm a better programmer than you are so I don't feel I have to do anything but still expect a paycheck every month", as you are, is not the correct way out here. And what's more, if you won't maintain it, then someone else will have to. It's not nice to cherry pick the nice stuff and leave the things you don't like to other folks. But you'll learn that (the hard way, I expect) as you grow up.



  • So every project you work on is extremely simple?  That's the only way I can see that you would only work on stuff you wrote.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    So, find another job. Or is there something about your personaility that makes it so you are unable to resign from your position?

    Uh, you've got the answer to that in the block you quoted.

    @Cbuttius said:

    If I didn't write it, and can't rewrite it, I won't maintain it. Simples.



  • I've been on the field for almost ten years and I can count with my left hand fingers (5) the amount of projects I've worked at from the beginning, and two of those are personal OSS projects, so learn to deal with it and live on. If you want to do a full rewrite for the sake of it, fork some project and have fun.



  • Somehow the only thing I can notice about this post is that the title almost, but not quite, rhymes.



  • @CodeNinja said:

    @Lorne Kates said:
    So, find another job. Or is there something about your personaility that makes it so you are unable to resign from your position?

    Probably the same thing that's keeping me at my job, an intense desire to not be homeless.

    So figure your budget the fuck out, stop buying shit you don't need and save for 6 months, then leave. It's not hard to manage money.

    Of course, put your shit up on LinkedIn and in 6 months of saving money you'll probably have 2 dozen job hits anyway. For me, the thought isn't, "am I going to get job offers" but more, "am I going to respond to or ignore the job offers I got this week."

    And hell you guys all think I'm some kind of incompetent idiot who doesn't know what I'm doing, and I have NO trouble getting a constant flow of job offers. Imagine how good you'll do at it, since you're so much better than I am.



  • @Cbuttius said:

    I'm fed up of being expected to maintain someone else's mess with MC Hammer managing me.

    If I didn't write it, and can't rewrite it, I won't maintain it. Simples.

    Just tell your boss: can't touch this.


  • BINNED

    @blakeyrat said:

    And hell you guys all think I'm some kind of incompetent idiot who doesn't know what I'm doing

    That's only when you have to deal with something noticeably different from what you're used to, and only because you'd rather complain about it being different than learn something that would help you operate efficiently.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @CodeNinja said:
    @Lorne Kates said:
    So, find another job. Or is there something about your personaility that makes it so you are unable to resign from your position?
    Probably the same thing that's keeping me at my job, an intense desire to not be homeless.

    So figure your budget the fuck out, stop buying shit you don't need and save for 6 months, then leave. It's not hard to manage money.

    Of course, put your shit up on LinkedIn and in 6 months of saving money you'll probably have 2 dozen job hits anyway. For me, the thought isn't, "am I going to get job offers" but more, "am I going to respond to or ignore the job offers I got this week."

    And hell you guys all think I'm some kind of incompetent idiot who doesn't know what I'm doing, and I have NO trouble getting a constant flow of job offers. Imagine how good you'll do at it, since you're so much better than I am.

    It's easy to get job offers via linkedin if you know how to write a profile and actually put the 10 minutes of effort it requires in.  And no I don't mean to suggest your incompetant.  I'm just agreeing with you. 

    However I do find many people do not actually know how to properly use linkedin, nevermind writing a resume/cover letter.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I have NO trouble getting a constant flow of job offers.

    Why would you want that?  I mean that would strike me as a reason not to be on LinkedIn than anything else, but then I don't hate my job.



  • @locallunatic said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    I have NO trouble getting a constant flow of job offers.

    Why would you want that?  I mean that would strike me as a reason not to be on LinkedIn than anything else, but then I don't hate my job.

    It can be annoying at times, but it also means that when and if you do decide to look, its more "under the radar" and easier.  A change of status that suddenly says you are interested in hearing about jobs is quite noticeable to contacts who are employed at your company.

     



  • @locallunatic said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    I have NO trouble getting a constant flow of job offers.

    Why would you want that? I mean that would strike me as a reason not to be on LinkedIn than anything else, but then I don't hate my job.

    Why not? If you don't like the job just ignore the email. It's not like you have to actually DO anything.



  • @PedanticCurmudgeon said:

    That's only when you have to deal with something noticeably different from what you're used to,

    Not different; worse. If Ruby had tools as good as C# I wouldn't complain about it. In fact I kind of like its syntax. But the tools suck, so I call them out for sucking, and why shouldn't I.



  • @galgorah said:

    A change of status that suddenly says you are interested in hearing about jobs is quite noticeable to contacts who are employed at your company.

    If something occurred to make you want to leave why would you want to hide this?  If you are interested in changing jobs due to something like moving to a new city (maybe spouse changing jobs or whatever) then again I don't see why you would hide it.  I mean I guess I could see trying to hide it if you are bored with your position and don't want to jeopardize a promotion or something.


  • Considered Harmful

    I knew I hated Ruby as soon as I saw you could put the conditional test AFTER the statement.



  • @locallunatic said:

    @galgorah said:

    A change of status that suddenly says you are interested in hearing about jobs is quite noticeable to contacts who are employed at your company.

    If something occurred to make you want to leave why would you want to hide this?  If you are interested in changing jobs due to something like moving to a new city (maybe spouse changing jobs or whatever) then again I don't see why you would hide it.  I mean I guess I could see trying to hide it if you are bored with your position and don't want to jeopardize a promotion or something.

    Pretty sure thats what he was referring to...  I generally always keep it up to date.  If anyone looks at it or asks, it's obvious that it gets updated every time I start a new role, which is every six months to a year in my case.

    I should note that it's six months to a year not because I have ADHD, it's just that I'm a contractor.  Which is a perk because it never raises any suspicions that your resume is always up to date and interview skills are almost always sharp.



  • Yeah, if you continually keep your resume/LinkedIn up-to-date, you don't get the "OMG this guy is going to leave!!!" panic, you just get people saying, "huh, he keeps it up-to-date, good policy."

    And hell, even if you do get the "OMG this guy is going to leave!!!" panic, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I got a 15% raise at my last workplace once my manager knew or suspected I was looking to change positions. It didn't keep me at that company, but it's some nice extra scratch in my pocket at least.



  • @joe.edwards said:

    I knew I hated Ruby as soon as I saw you could put the conditional test AFTER the statement.

    Yeah... Like in C-style languages. Heh, who uses those, anyway.



  • @toon said:

    @joe.edwards said:

    I knew I hated Ruby as soon as I saw you could put the conditional test AFTER the statement.

    Yeah... Like in C-style languages. Heh, who uses those, anyway.

    [citation needed]


  • All I can think of is do {} while ();



  • @CodeNinja said:

    Probably the same thing that's keeping me at my job, an intense desire to not be homeless.
    Why would you become homeless if you lose your job? Where are you from? Some third-world country?

     



  • @joe.edwards said:

    I knew I hated Ruby as soon as I saw you could put the conditional test AFTER the statement.
    You're not a big fan of Perl either, I suppose.

    Perl has the 'unless' statement. You can write an entire block of statements and at the very end write 'unless ( expr )'.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    All I can think of is do {} while ();

    People ought to listen to Blakey!



  • @joe.edwards said:

    I knew I hated Ruby as soon as I saw you could put the conditional test AFTER the statement.
     

    lol


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Severity One said:

    @CodeNinja said:
    Probably the same thing that's keeping me at my job, an intense desire to not be homeless.
    Why would you become homeless if you lose your job?
    Not that I think I should be stating the obvious, but inability to pay the rent/mortgage due to lack of savings?



  • I will explain my post above in more detail now. I was in a bit of a bad mood when I posted it.

    "Brain the size of a planet" comes from Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, and is generally a reference to someone who feels their ability to use their brain is being undermined by being given only menial tasks. Marvin the Android complained about this.

    "working with MC Hammer" is a sort of lol term for a team-lead or project manager who says "you can't touch this" all the time.

    Essentially, if I am put in charge of something to maintain, I want to be given the responsibility and ability to change "as I see fit", which means being able to rewrite parts if I have time to and if it will be beneficial in the long run, i.e. far more maintainable.

    Of course people should work "in a team" and therefore if you plan to rewrite something or redo something, this should be discussed in a sensible way about what benefit (and risk) the change would bring, and how best such a change would be best implemented.

    In my own current situation, I have actually now moved to another team within the company where we are designing a new system.

     



  • @Severity One said:

    @joe.edwards said:

    I knew I hated Ruby as soon as I saw you could put the conditional test AFTER the statement.
    You're not a big fan of Perl either, I suppose.

    Perl has the 'unless' statement. You can write an entire block of statements and at the very end write 'unless ( expr )'.

     

    Saying you dislike Perl because of it allowing you to put conditionals at the end of statements is like saying you disliked Osama bin Laden because he had his hair unkempt.

     

    Or drawing a simile between a programming language and a terrorist.

     



  •  @Zecc said:

    Or drawing a simile between a programming language and a terrorist.

    No, no, no, it's like when Hitler is driving his nazi car in reverse, and.... wait


  • BINNED

    @blakeyrat said:

    @PedanticCurmudgeon said:
    That's only when you have to deal with something noticeably different from what you're used to,

    Not different; worse. If Ruby had tools as good as C# I wouldn't complain about it. In fact I kind of like its syntax. But the tools suck, so I call them out for sucking, and why shouldn't I.


    The fact that you expect to work with Ruby the same way as you would with C# is exactly what I was getting at in the part of my post that you for some reason snipped out:

    and only because you'd rather complain about it being different than learn something that would help you operate efficiently
    Look, people somehow manage to get things to work in Ruby without a VS-style debugger. So the question is: what do they know that you don't?


  • @PedanticCurmudgeon said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    @PedanticCurmudgeon said:
    That's only when you have to deal with something noticeably different from what you're used to,
    Not different; worse. If Ruby had tools as good as C# I wouldn't complain about it. In fact I kind of like its syntax. But the tools suck, so I call them out for sucking, and why shouldn't I.
    The fact that you expect to work with Ruby the same way as you would with C# is exactly what I was getting at in the part of my post that you for some reason snipped out:
    and only because you'd rather complain about it being different than learn something that would help you operate efficiently
    Look, people somehow manage to get things to work in Ruby without a VS-style debugger. So the question is: what do they know that you don't?
    I think it's more like "they just don't know any better".  Or maybe it's a stockholm syndrome kind of thing...


  • BINNED

    Yes, because there isn't anyone on the entire planet who has used both Ruby and C#.



  • @PedanticCurmudgeon said:

    Look, people somehow manage to get things to work in Ruby without a VS-style debugger.

    Nobody's denying that. Same applies to PHP, many large and complex apps are written in it and work.

    But that data point alone says nothing. Maybe the team that built the app in Ruby took three times longer to do so than they would have if they'd built it in C# or Java. We don't know.

    Oh and BTW, there's a part I forgot to mention: not only does Ruby not have a single decent code debugger, the Windows interpreter is buggy and ignores Windows' proxy settings, meaning you can't even use an HTTP debugger (like Fiddler) with it. Surely you consider that a WTF.

    @PedanticCurmudgeon said:

    So the question is: what do they know that you don't?

    If you honestly have an answer to this, I'd like to know what it is. I'm inclined to go with the already-posted "they don't know any better".

    I can tell you this for sure: while there might be teams out there that "know something that I don't" and are writing excellent bug-free Ruby without the use of a debugger, the team I've been working with most certainly does not know anything I don't.



  • @PedanticCurmudgeon said:

    Yes, because there isn't anyone on the entire planet who has used both Ruby and C#.

    If they come from the Ruby world, they'd probably see no value to the C# debugger (not knowing any better) and ignore it, no harm done. If they come from the C# world like me, they'd probably just complain about how shitty Ruby development tools are.


  • BINNED

    I'm sure you could find out pretty quickly by posting a question on a Ruby forum instead of complaining here.


  • BINNED

    @blakeyrat said:

    @PedanticCurmudgeon said:
    Yes, because there isn't anyone on the entire planet who has used both Ruby and C#.

    If they come from the Ruby world, they'd probably see no value to the C# debugger (not knowing any better) and ignore it, no harm done. If they come from the C# world like me, they'd probably just complain about how shitty Ruby development tools are.

    Apparently approaching a new language by asking people who are good at it how they work with it is out of the question.



  • I doubt it; I've already read the threads on Stack Overflow. There's two IDEs with integrated debuggers, Ruby-In-Steel which is a Visual Studio plug-in to support Ruby (where the debugger craps out if the set of locals contains more than 1 MB of data) and RubyMine where the debugger is generously described as "very buggy".

    Good development tools in Ruby simply do not exist. Unless you have new evidence to provide, this is not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact.



  • @PedanticCurmudgeon said:

    Apparently approaching a new language by asking people who are good at it how they work with it is out of the question.

    It doesn't matter how they work on it. It matters how I want to work on it. And I do everything, everything in development in the debugger. If you hand me a large project, thousands of lines of code, and I have no debugger, I don't have the only tool that would help me work-out how the code actually works and what it actually does. Maybe someone can do that without a debugger, but I'm not that person.

    I don't have the kind of brain it takes to remember thousands of CLI commands or weird keyboard shortcuts in Vim. I just don't. My dyslexia is too bad for that. There's nothing wrong with my brain otherwise. C# is accessible to the way I need to work. Ruby is not. Ruby is written by unthinking and uncaring jerks who don't care about me or how I prefer to work. It's not for me.

    And if Ruby doesn't care about me, then I don't care about it. Fuck it.

    ... but even all that aside, remember you can't even use an HTTP debugger with Ruby. If you have a simple question like, "is this Facebook library throwing because Facebook's returning 500 statuses, or is it sending incorrect URLs to Facebook?" You literally have no tool to answer that simple question. And yes this is a real-life example that came up just a week ago-- the "solution" was guess-and-check. You have to admit that's a WTF that has nothing to do with my preferred way of working.


  • BINNED

    @blakeyrat said:

    I doubt it; I've already read the threads on Stack Overflow. There's two IDEs with integrated debuggers, Ruby-In-Steel which is a Visual Studio plug-in to support Ruby (where the debugger craps out if the set of locals contains more than 1 MB of data) and RubyMine where the debugger is generously described as "very buggy".
    Your answers here indicate that you may be asking the wrong question. It appears that Ruby has a builtin debugger. Of course, because it's a command-line debugger I'm sure you won't like it.

    Good development tools in Ruby simply do not exist.
    If by "good development tools" you mean tools that work like Visual Studio, that's part of the point you're working exceedingly hard to keep missing.
    Unless you have new evidence to provide, this is not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact.
    No amount of evidence changes something from a matter of opinion to a matter of fact.

  • BINNED

    @blakeyrat said:

    I don't have the kind of brain it takes to remember thousands of CLI commands or weird keyboard shortcuts in Vim. I just don't. My dyslexia is too bad for that. There's nothing wrong with my brain otherwise. C# is accessible to the way I need to work. Ruby is not. Ruby is written by unthinking and uncaring jerks who don't care about me or how I prefer to work. It's not for me.

    I'm glad you finally got my point, but you're still missing a distinction: bad for me (subjective) vs. bad for everyone (objective). "Ruby is written by unthinking and uncaring jerks" (aside from being a good example of the hyperbole that everyone so likes to hear from you) is a statement of the objectively bad variety. "Ruby does not have good development tools" is another.

    Had you restricted your rants to statements like "It's not for me" or "It doesn't fit the way I work," we wouldn't have wasted time establishing that this wasn't just another case of you not being willing to learn anything, and we could have moved on to complaining about what people who complain about Ruby should be complaining about: it's dog slow, it encourages monkey-patching, and dynamic languages make it too hard to keep track of types as programs get larger.



  • What the fuck do you want from me? Are you Boomzilla's baby brother? Fuck.

    You don't seem to have any particular interest in Ruby yourself, so what's the point? I feel like you think you're a prosecuting attorney and you're trying to trick me into saying something, but I don't know what it is you expect me to say. You're just randomly grilling me over and over and over again for no end purpose. Again, like Boomzilla used to do. What do you want exactly? Just tell me. Christ.

    Fuck you. I'm not responding to you anymore.



  • @PedanticCurmudgeon said:

    I'm glad you finally got my point, but you're still missing a distinction: bad for me (subjective) vs. bad for everyone (objective).

    If that's what you were very very very very slooooooooooooooowly getting at, why the fuck didn't you just post it 5423457234 posts ago instead of spamming up the fucking forum, you ass?

    @PedanticCurmudgeon said:

    and we could have moved on to complaining about what people who complain about Ruby should be complaining about: it's dog slow, it encourages monkey-patching, and dynamic languages make it too hard to keep track of types as programs get larger.

    You don't even fucking LIKE RUBY!!! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR DISEASED MIND!!!!! Where the fuck do people like you come from!? Jesus. Fuck off. Fuck off and die.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    You don't even fucking LIKE RUBY!!! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR DISEASED MIND!!!!! Where the fuck do people like you come from!? Jesus. Fuck off. Fuck off and die.

    Do coworkers ever poke and prod you until you erupt like this, just for their own sick amusement? I totally would.



  • Today I Learned: blakeyrat is a point-and-drool guy


  • Considered Harmful

    @Zecc said:

    @Severity One said:

    @joe.edwards said:

    I knew I hated Ruby as soon as I saw you could put the conditional test AFTER the statement.
    You're not a big fan of Perl either, I suppose.

    Perl has the 'unless' statement. You can write an entire block of statements and at the very end write 'unless ( expr )'.

     

    Saying you dislike Perl because of it allowing you to put conditionals at the end of statements is like saying you disliked Osama bin Laden because he had his hair unkempt.

     

    Or drawing a simile between a programming language and a terrorist.

     

    Yes, I would probably hate Perl as well. Write-only language and all that.

    Blakey's workflow is to watch the debugger and see what happens. I read code like a narrative, running statement by statement in my head and updating state accordingly. If I read ten (or worse, 50+) lines of code and at the very end I see " } unless( foo )" I feel like the code just shouted "HA! TRICKED YOU!" It's like finding out the last 10 chapters of a novel were really just a bad dream sequence. It just totally fucks my mental interpreter. Even with a single line, I'll have to read it and then see the condition and undo the changes to the registers in my mental VM. I'm capable of doing this, but it basically feels like stubbing my toe.

    If the language allows it, I know someone will use it, and then I'll end up having to support it. When I write code, my number one priority is making sure it won't be painful for me to go back and maintain, fix, update, or debug. This "feature" goes against the spirit of that goal.


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