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Well, my question was not "why were they removed?", but "what can I do to get them back?". And they were removed -- they were there!

I have seen the link (back when it was just a proposal), and I cannot find a compelling removal reason in the list of disadvantages. Let's cover each in turn:

• 1. new users. Add one or subtract one is difficult? I think not. Plus, removing a great feature because it may be difficult for some users to learn is weak — might as well ban regular expressions all together.
• 2. minimal expressive difference. I could not disagree more. Not only am I saving keystrokes when typing, but it takes me significantly less time to undertand the meaning of x++ than x += 1 when I come across them in code. Again, increment and decrement are concepts apart from full-up addition, and having dedicated operators increases the overall exressiveness of the language.
• 3. Swift isn't c. This is a truly spurious reason. Neither is Perl, Python, Go, Ruby, JavaScript, Matlab, Mathematica, etc. And yet Swift still has the bitwise operators from c, so this disadvantage can be little more than list padding.
• 4. Swift has features that replace many of the typical uses of ++ and --. This is true, as far as it goes. However, increment are decrement are used in significantly more instances than as a loop counter.
• 5. ++ and -- are hard to read and encourage "tricky" code. I believe this is conflating two concerns: confusing and makes for "tricky" code. Well, I cannot disagree with the first more; I assert that the semantics of ++ and -- are well understood and their appearance saves significant time when parsing by the maintainer. As for "tricky" coders — well, they'll screw you no matter what you do (you can write FORTRAN code in any language — or see http://www.mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html). Basically, don't hobble the language in anticipation of "misuse".
• 6. the result of ++ and -- are difficult to predict, even with well defined operator precedence. I don't buy it. But again, there will be jerks that write difficult to understand code. If they really scare you, then follow one of the presented alternatives and remove the pre versions or post versions, but not both! Or, even better, have Xcode flag their convoluted use (or generate a compiler warning for those who don't use/have Xcode).
• 7. not every data type can use them. Spurious. What about %, ~, |, ^, &, <<, >>, &+, &-, or unary - and +?. Not to mention the logical operators (|| and &&), which had typically supported types removed! Moreover, increment and decrement are useful to add to a class (more so than, say, bitwise or).

The above list seems seems so negative, I know. What is missing is the positives that increment and decrement provide; I tried to express that before. Sure, I'd love to have the ? : operator, but I'll survive (I hope you like wordy code); but take away my ++ and -- and coding becomes constant frustration that raises my stress level and will eventually lay me low.

At least we know that you have been smoking some nice cognitive dissonance crack there. If you recall Bush admitted to cocaine use.

Seriously if you're going to slander Hillary/Obama you might not want to juxtapose them with Bush.

Of course you're also the one saying that this somehow affects what they are capable of. Bush had 20 years as a mostly known to the public world model citizen, not unlike Hillary/Obama. I wouldn't hold what any of them did in their youths against them at this point when it come to recreational drug use. Of course Bush had known issues with alcohol and cocaine, I don't believe either of those had any affect on his presidency though.

There is far too much polarization in politics today. Painting either side as evil is completely unproductive. I think its fair to characterize that the modern Republican party at the federal level has been very unproductive while the modern democratic party has been ineffectual. When you have people outright saying that their goal is not to pass legislation to make Obama fail you have to question the character of the representative making the claim. We didn't see the level of obstruction while Bush was President but it would be just as wrong. The only difference being is that democrats are like herding cats. You're never going to get them lockstep like the Republican party.

At the end of the day we're all supposed to be on the same team. It's not about liberal or conservative, its about the great good. At least that's what it should be about.

Well, maybe you should try this much more venerable, thorough, and entertaining encyclopedia of unmaintainable code tips. Should make you as immovable as the CEO's firstborn.

He has an unfair advantage in the area of unmaintainable code since he is writing about C/C++.

Well, maybe you should try this much more venerable, thorough, and entertaining encyclopedia of unmaintainable code tips. Should make you as immovable as the CEO's firstborn.

Meet Roedy Green, an unusual dude with decent Java documentation.

Quoted: "CMP's purpose is to stand up for the rights of plants and animals. Animals also includes cetacea, humans, gay people, atheists, war victims and invertebrates. CMP attempts to inculcate planetary consciousness — concern for the planet as a whole."

This essay says that it's good practice.

The usual answer for buying commercial software with a support contract is "to have a throat to choke". If you're into the vendor for $20k, the person on the other end of the phone tends to know something. Below $5k, good luck with that. At this point I'd specify open source below that price point just to shed the delusion that having a throat to choke is worth lifting a finger. Such a crock.

There really ought to be some stronger anti-fraud provisions against this kind of tech support experience. They can just sit there and stonewall, no money down. Appalling. A few high-profile class action lawsuits against tech support fraud would be a good start. Lying is not ignorance, it's plain old fraud. The guy on the phone must be presumed to speak on behalf of the organization. Cultivated ignorance is no excuse, either.

The usual business sentiment is that lying is the best policy, until it isn't. Intel had some 'splainin to do over the Pentium FDIV bug. More recently, Nvidia proved to be a slow learner.

From Nvidia reports problem with laptop chips

Nvidia will take a charge ... of $150 million to $200 million to cover the expected cost of repairing and replacing the products ... didn't say [which] products were affected. ... products have been failing in the field at "higher than normal rates," Nvidia said.

Higher than normal ... for small values of $200 million.

Let's not pretend that AMD invented this mess, or perfected the drill. The museum of culpability is standing room only: Iomega click of death, IBM Deathstar disk drives, Fujitsu disk drives, ABit leaky capacitors, IBM Mwave, an early version of the KT7A which scribbled on hard drives (until a BIOS fix), and the even more brilliant EIDE controller flaw, just to name a few off the top of my head I've personally experienced.

I never actually touched a machine with the godforsaken IBM MWave, but in my foolish youth, I agreed to do the tech support call for a dim-witted friend who stupidly purchased such a system without asking me first (did I mention he was an idiot?). I was soaking my wrists in warm water before the call ended. If no one has ever been found lying in pool of their own blood for buying IBM, it's not because they never tried.

Long ago I had a girlfriend afflicted with the bogus EIDE chip (Zeos Pantera, early Pentium era) that immediately scribbled all over the hard drive once you enabled a fast software disk cache (such as Hypercache, or any of its competitors). Immediately meant your system would melt down in less than a day for no obvious reason, once enough digital cannon balls toppled your castle. Relationship harmony dictated that I re-install the OS over and over and over again, since the cause took a full week to diagnose.

I'm well aware that it's a black art to get these complicated products right every time (excluding IBM's MWave, where the main challenge was to dream up something so brutally stupid in the first place). Personally, I don't have the stomach to sell disk drives. IBM and Fujitsu both sought ulcer relief in the aftermath of their data chomping disasters.

Normally I have a fairly high tolerance for "shit happens". What severely raises my ire is pissing on common sense. The high point of my tech support career was an HP printer driver which borked a friend's Windows 2000 machine to the point where it would only boot in safe mode.

Of course, HP provided a driver uninstall program ... brilliantly engineered to require a screen resolution which safe mode doesn't offer. Imagine if GM designed a car jack too tall to stick under (wiener clause: the lift strut beside) a flat tire, because they needed more room to draw their logo. Feeling impressed?

I then went to the HP online support sit

It's not very sexy, but it's fascinating and readable. I remember coming across it in Dillons bookshop, not knowing the name, and flicking through. Half an hour later, when I realised the time, I knew I had to buy it! Other books go into more exhausting detail (Knuth in particular), or cover a wider range (Knuth again!), or more modern ideas or languages. But Sedgewick is a great read, and I've been through it several times.

It covers all the basics (maths, searching, sorting, strings, graphs, and touches on FFTs and hardware and optimisation), and gives enough detail that you could go off and write some programs yourself. But more importantly, it explains them: how each algorithm works, what it's trying to achieve, how it behaves, and why. And it's because it explains the ideas so well that I'd recommend it. After every section I felt I'd learned something -- not because I had to, but for the sheer pleasure of understanding something new and interesting.

Other recommendations: Effective Java (a staggering amount of insight into the language), Thinking in Java (by someone who understands that language is more than just syntax), Deep C Secrets (again a pile of insight, interspersed with anecdotes and some rather off-the-wall diversions), Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls (problem-solving in bite-sized chunks -- a little dated but still interesting). Plus I've already mentioned Knuth. K&R is well done, though narrow in scope. I find Design Patterns useful, but more for clarifying things I've already seen than for learning new things. I've never actually read The Mythical Man-Month, but people I respect mention it, so I'm sure it's well worth reading too!

Of course, times being what they are, especially in this field, a lot of interesting stuff is on-line. Some hat should go without saying hereabouts include the latest Jargon File, some of Eric Raymond's books, and more online documentation and archives than anyone but Google can cope with.

Other interesting articles include The Programmer's Stone, a guide to writing Unmaintainable Code, The Ten Commandments for C Programmers (annotated edition), Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, What Colour are your Bits?, and Guy Steele's Growing a Language.

I personally hate VB, because every time I've heard someone declare it 'easier' I've gone on to see them pull out a wodge of utter bodge coding, which is basically unmaintainable. Because they didn't understand what a program was _supposed_ to be like, and VB let them do it. I'm currently working on one bit, that's a really ugly botch of 'goto' style code, but with a few prototyped procedures in there, just to throw me off the scent. It looks a lot like 5 different sets of copy-pasta code, and it's ... well, I'm still itching for the time to do a full rewrite, and have almost justified it based upon the amount of extra lead time any form of modification to this ugly hack job is taking.

Erm. Which I think's agreeing with what you said :).

Someone who knows how to program, knows that http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html is a comedy site, even if they don't know the specifics of a given language.

Candian Mind Products http://mindprod.com/ for Java. Good info, and some of the dirt too.

This site is good for a number of languages, particularly for Java. Just read it and do the opposite.

If wealthy, polluting industries "pay to pollute", does that actually reduce emissions?

Where does the money go?

You can get the benefits of both by having the government sell a fixed number of certificates (who gets to buy them is another issue) and letting the secondary market take care of the process of marginal cost/benefit equalisation. The issue price would have to be below the market equilibrium price, but with a bit of practice the government can figure it out.

Current practice in the EU, AFAIK, is Model 1: issue the the certificates, let the market trade. In the last few years there were far too many permits on the market, so that the costs for a ton of CO2 were somewhere around 0.26â, but this year it's around 20â, I think (haven't checked the market recently).

I don't know what the GP meant with his "two largest emerging world economy haven't signed the Kyoto protocol" statement: Brazil, China, and India have all ratified it.

Answers to the OP's further questions can be found in the Kyoto protocol itself:
Full Text
Layman's guide

I'd only got as far as item 3 on Rob Weir's list, "... The allowed values of this type express the measurement units to be used: Auto, Twentieths of a point, Nil (no width), Fiftieths of a percent. I find these choices to be capricious and not based on any sound engineering principle..." and from the HowTo, in the section on Coding Obfuscation, item 6: "Foolish Consistency Is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds When you need a character constant, use many different formats: ' ', 32, 0x20, 040..."

Is this resemblance coincidence? I doubt it.

[Coding Obfuscation section] http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmainobfuscation.html

I'd only got as far as item 3 on Rob Weir's list, "... The allowed values of this type express the measurement units to be used: Auto, Twentieths of a point, Nil (no width), Fiftieths of a percent. I find these choices to be capricious and not based on any sound engineering principle..." and from the HowTo, in the section on Coding Obfuscation, item 6: "Foolish Consistency Is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds When you need a character constant, use many different formats: ' ', 32, 0x20, 040..."

Is this resemblance coincidence? I doubt it.

[Coding Obfuscation section] http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmainobfuscation.html

use all sarcastic hints from http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html. Once they start getting desperate, ask them to produce complete documentation so you can actually do your job.

Come on. When was the last time you had anything good to say about anybody else's code? Ever? All programmers say all other programmers are incompetent. And typically, management believes us.

Well, for an even more comprehensive index, see: how to write unmaintainable code

This works for all languages and methods.. The only time you don't want to do this is if you have to maintain YOUR own code.

Although java centric one must include information on how to write UNmaintainable code as well. The original unmaintainable code site (AFAIK)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't he the guy who developed the Hungarian notation

And thereby making huge swaths of code unreadable. How much Microsoft code uses a rgs16 to store 32 byte values? Some consider Hungarian notation to be the tactical nuke equivalent for unmaintainable code.

http://mindprod.com/politics/bushismsgay.html

Evidence Bush Enjoys Kinky S&M and Gay Sex

There's hardly any inconsistencies on that page. The only ones that are inconsistencies are simply methods in the JRE that don't follow the string case conventions. Wow. People still type method names (and not code-completion)? ;-)

The rest of the things are simply "gotchas" (the title of the page) that might catch you out coming from another language. And most of them are desirable, just confusing if you're a newbie to the language.

And the "over-design" is what makes it very very secure. When was the last time you heard of a buffer-overrun hack in a java app? That's one of the main aims of the JRE.

...making it easier for Linux users to eat tree bark. Java has jumped the shark. It's the COBOL of the 21st century. C# is less baroque, and is comparable in size for the SDK and runtime. Applications can be written and deployed more quickly and easily in Python or Ruby. Seen any new Java applets in your web browser lately? Not any to compare with Flash, Javascript, PHP, and AJAX. It's no good for system scripts, like Perl (or the even sh for that matter). It's overdesigned and inconsistent. It will run on your cell phone, possibly. Big woop.

Even better sources for indecent Esperanto can be found in the article How To Talk Dirty In Esperanto: Kiel Paroli Maldece en Esperanto. When you're done with that, check out Tabuaj Vortoj En Esperanto.

The article is obviously meant to address people who think this way

Actually, the article is obviously a joke.

In fact it's a joke stolen from Roedy Green; the original starts with the words, "This is my most popular essay. It is amazing how many people don't realize it is tongue in cheek."

(And, as others have pointed out, it's a dupe.)

This page: http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html
Says: ©1996-2005 Canadian Mind Products

Not to mention being much more comprehensive.

This web page has been around for ages. The original version is at http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html and has been updated loads since. I remember reading this when I first started work after university, back in 1999. Still funny though.

Thankfully, the OP provides a link to the original author, Roedy Green.

Here's another good article he wrote in the same vein called How to Code like a Newbie.

I was in stitches the first time I read it several years ago.

Roedy started this back in the 90's, you could at least have the decency to link to the latest version.

A co-worker sent me these unmaintainable code essays back in August 2005. Taken from AQFL.

Successful Strategies for Commenting Code By Ryan Campbell
The Fine Art of Commenting by Bernhard Spuida
How To Write Unmaintainable Code

Read this thoroughly, and try to do the opposite.

Like this? marypoppins = ( superman + starship ) / god;

http://mindprod.com/religion/biblestudy.html

Have fun explaining all that, then.

Here's a funny guide about how to write unmaintainable code. Here's a link to the documentation section:

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmaindocumentation.htm l

and here are the general principles:

"To foil the maintenance programmer, you have to understand how he thinks. He has your giant program. He has no time to read it all, much less understand it. He wants to rapidly find the place to make his change, make it and get out and have no unexpected side effects from the change.

He views your code through a toilet paper tube. He can only see a tiny piece of your program at a time. You want to make sure he can never get at the big picture from doing that. You want to make it as hard as possible for him to find the code he is looking for. But even more important, you want to make it as awkward as possible for him to safely ignore anything. "

I got this from a co-worker last week...

Unmaintainable Code article gave tips from the masters on how you write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes. Further, if you follow all these rules religiously, you will even guarantee yourself a lifetime of employment, since no one but you has a hope in hell of maintaining the code. Then again, if you followed all these rules religiously, even you wouldn't be able to maintain the code!

If you want to write perfectly unmaintainable code, you should follow these guidlines

They explain how to write perfectly unmaintainable code. Suggestions range from naming variable (re-using variables outside of scopes, using single lettre names, using people name), camouflage (using #defines, etc), and many other perfectly normal (albeit evil) strategies

1.2.4.6.3.13 - Display all impacts for activity where selected
mitigations can apply (short pseudocode omitted).

Act1_2_4_6_3_13()

How To Write Unmaintainable Code

In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes. Further, if you follow all these rules religiously, you will even guarantee yourself a lifetime of employment, since no one but you has a hope in hell of maintaining the code. Then again, if you followed all these rules religiously, even you wouldn't be able to maintain the code!

You don't want to overdo this. Your code should not look hopelessly unmaintainable, just be that way. Otherwise it stands the risk of being rewritten or refactored.

i read this article a few years ago and personally found it interesting. as i bolded out, documentation is important even for yourself. it depends on your motive for or for not including good comments for your code. if you're on a team, good comments helps speed up the project. if anyone else will be reading your code and using it, i think it's personally quite important to leave comments especially on what the function does and how to use it.

on the other hand, as this article states, if you really really want to keep your job... then useful comments are totally unnecessary for that'll only help the guy that's coming along to replace you. ;p

Writing unmaintainable code.

Very evil people were about and the average joe needed some measure of hope that good would triumph.

Not much has changed

There are evil people about and the general population feels powerless.

You're 100% right!

It is possible to replay the execution of programs that communicate with the outside world, rather than just in an isolated virtual machine: you have to log nondeterministic events. See http://www.erights.org/elang/concurrency/determini sm/overview.html.

The first language I know of that supported replay is the Abundance database language, back in 1986. Also see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ReversibleProgrammingLangua ge.

Perhaps this would be helpful to you...
http://mindprod.com/unmain.html

This link comes to mind

Really depends if your job is replacable.

Here's a guide on How To Write Unmaintainable Code.

In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes. Further, if you follow all these rules religiously, you will even guarantee yourself a lifetime of employment, since no one but you has a hope in hell of maintaining the code. Then again, if you followed all these rules religiously, even you wouldn't be able to maintain the code!

XML munches up bandwidth like a lardy butter lover. Yes, yes, RSS feeds are handy, but they dont actually do anything that couldnt be achieved with a much leaner binary format. Its 2004, we dont have byte compatablitily issues any more

See Roedy Greens (one time comp.java.lang FAQ maintainer)excellent essay on why XML causes these problems.

Nice reply. If I had mod points I would give you some.

Fortran goes back to when saving bits was a good thing. I learned all my bad habits from Fortran.

But I don't really use it anymore. These days I write my unmaintainable code in Perl.

There are a lot of good principles for writing bad code here.

Some gems:
Naming variables :
#1 Baby names: Buy a copy of a baby naming book and you'll never be at a loss for variable names. Fred is a wonderful name, and easy to type. If you're looking for easy-to-type variable names, try adsf or aoeu if you type with a DSK keyboard.

#17 Bedazzling Names: Choose variable names with irrelevant emotional connotation. e.g.:
marypoppins = ( superman + starship ) / god;
This confuses the reader because they have difficulty disassociating the emotional connotations of the words from the logic they're trying to think about.

#26 Misleading names: Make sure that every method does a little bit more (or less) than its name suggests. As a simple example, a method named isValid(x) should as a side effect convert x to binary and store the result in a database.

Isn't this article a bit like the classic, How to Write Unmaintainable Code?

Personal favorite pet peeve:
http://mindprod.com/unmainnaming.html

28. o_apple obj_apple
: Use an "o" or "obj" prefix for each instance of the class to show that you're thinking of the big, polymorphic picture.

Love that one. I see it all damn day.