Flutterby™! : An honest coder 2009-04-28 13:09:58.746017+00

An honest coder

2009-04-28 13:09:58.746017+00 by JT 4 comments

Reading this guy's code comments reminds me of working with meuon. Instead of verbalizing his opinion though, this guy actually comments his code with it.

Brilliant. And, damn, I wish I could express myself that well, although to be fair the places I've run across such things have often been in proprietary code that only I understood.

Rant coming about working with SOAP, Apache, Axis2, XML, Java and C. It's going to be a classic, but I have to prove I can make it work first so i can validate my opinion of why the future of computer science, and the internet can NOT continue down this brain dead fat pig of a means to exchange simple datasets and requests.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-28 14:28:16.556107+00 by: Jack William Bell

Great Ghu that comment is funny! Reminds me of some work I did on XM Radio integration; their control API (theoretically ASCII over serial) had the same problems with inconsistent offsets and alignments.

FWIW to meuon: SOAP is an example of how to over-engineer something into total uselessness for the real world. Every time I have to make a SOAP call anymore I ignore all the damn framework stuff and just write code to generate the call and handle the response(s) by hand. It actually seems quicker to write to me. And I can prove it uses at least an order of magnitude less CPU. (The latter is because I usually don't even parse the results as XML. In nine out of ten cases the possible responses are so simple I can just extract the results with regular string matching. Don't even need regex, another abomination...)

For a couple of processes recently I have taken to firing up Wireshark, sniffing a transaction or two, grabbing the resulting TCP stream, and doing regular expression search and replace on that string for my actual query. Alas in the particular system I'm trying to 'bot, there's also some sort of session data included in that stream that expires after a while, so I do that, my bot works for a week or two, then starts failing.

Unfortunately, the whole flawed attitudes that led to SOAP are being promulgated heavily by all these kids who've just graduated from college and don't have enough experience to know that what they're doing may result in "elegant" (for academic notions thereof) architectures. This leads to crap like the .NET framework, where you can see that someone put a whole lot of thought into the system, but the only way to understand WTF they were thinking is to fire protons into the black box and see what comes out.

I've seen several people rave about the command completion in VisualStudio, and I just want to grab those folks by the shirt collar and smack them around while screaming "If the API had been well designed, you wouldn't need that crap", while muttering things about how Apple figured out that non-user-controlled modal interfaces were evil back in 1983 or so.

And I find it interesting that Haskell and functional programming, the complete opposite of Object Oriented thinking, are currently seeing a resurgence.