Slashdot Mirror
Programmers Hold Funerals for Old Code
MacBrave writes "The AP has an interesting story about how the programming staff at an Ohio company are holding funerals for retired or 'killed' programs. I dunno, this sounds a little TOO geeky for my tastes......."
Or do they bury it?
This is a bit to geeky, I mean its just a bunch of characters. To quote William Shatner "Get a Life!!"
Call me and my voicemail! 914-713-6795. (wow, I have the balls to post my voip number on
10 PRINT "He's dead, Jim."
20 BEEP
30 GOTO 10
RUN
It's only virtually dead.
you had me at #!
At the last place I worked, we retired a particular version of the application. We printed out the code onto paper, and all gathered around the project manager's barbeque and burnt the code, praying that we never, ever had to touch it again.
Please don't associate funerals with geeky, its disturbing to think so many people should be associated with holding funerals...
#!/bin/sh
echo "first post"
Sure, they may not be people, but it's easily comparable to a pet's funeral. They didn't have a so-called 'soul', nor were they human. However, they meant a lot to us, regardless of their intelligence.
I think the same could hold true for a program. Admittedly, I've never had an emotional connection to any of my programs, but I know a few people who might actually love their code, and I could sorta-kinda-not-really-but-ok-it's-your-choice understand.
I cant wait for the day that ASP.NET has it's funeral... so I can pay my disrespects.
The 'dead' programs represent a chunk of those coder's lives and a fitting sendoff provides closure for the 'parents' of that code.
TOO Geeky? No way! Just look at this: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/01/183721 5Z
fastduke hears TAPS and stands at attention
Fastduke
c=0;while(true){c++;c--}
It was such a nice program . . . sniff sniff. I remember when I wrote this line here . . . fixed a bug that crashed the server.
God knows how many times I've sat in front of my source code knowing that not only could it be made better, but that there is probably a better way to do it. Unfortunately, the reason old code stays around hobbling around the system with plaster casts around its legs and band aids covering its heads, yes more than one head because at some point I figured that it would be better to stick a brand new head on there rather than refactor the functionality out and create a brand new program. No, reuse of old code is like the Jesus of programming. No matter how dead and in the grave Lazarus.exe may be, somehow we can reach in and squeeze just a few more years of life out of the system be applying just another patch, just another incantation. Lazarus, come forth! When in reality, it would have been better to leave that rotting corpse in the grave.
A ritual like they describe in the article seems like a really good way of encouraging long-needed rewrites and the tossing out of old code. Good code lives on, always young and fresh and rosy fingered. Timeless, never aging, good code does its job and does it well. Good systems are built around good code and intuitive use cases are built around good systems. A system that needs constant tweaking and patching and magic to keep it going is a system that is hopelessly falling towards the tomb. Better to print that code out and bury it in the cemetary and replace it with good code than to find another way to keep the herking and jerking system from collapsing under its own weight.
They just cut it out and dump it in the recycle bin (or trash depending on your OS preference)
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
BASIC has joined BSD and Bob Hope on the "B" team. We wish them the best in their new endeavours, wherever they may be.
Back in the early 90's, the department my father was in held a funeral for the ampersand in their Lotus Notes email addresses. Yeah, they were the hardcore nerds of the company... dealing with Generation and Transmission at a large power company. Unfortunately it was also a sign that the entire department was about to be laid off.
Well, I'll probably get flamed for discussing cremation but...
pun intended.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
"BSD *ducks*" :-P
if BSD is dead wouldnt it be moe likely to fall than simply duck?
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Rather than a funeral, is there a cremation option?
:gcc fortran.f90 gray.ash:
Take FORTRAN for example...
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Copy the directory to a folder to be backed up (or burn it on a CD) Delete original code.
OR
Make sure all old outdated code is surrounded by
Old dead code...
Insert profane comment here about how crappy the guy is who wrote it if it's not mine
*/
And save it for later reference. No telling when I am going to need to scam some of my old code when I am in a hurry some day.
jesus.exe:
......
revive("3 days");
......
webpage
I can't belive no-one has yet mentioned the cremation that was heald for Ultima Online 2 after it was cancelled, I belive at Richard Garriot's estate too..
And I think there was one for OSI after EA gobbled it up, but then again I might have just been high....
whie I and they
lay me to rest
I'm gonna...
I'm gonna...
I'm gonna...
I'm gonna...
I'm gonna...
I'm gonna...
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I have a nasty problem of burying my Dell Windows Boxes late at night.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
The temptation to keep old code to save the effort of reinventing the whole approach is very real. Most programmers maintain code, not originate it. So actually burying or burning the printout is more than just symbolic, it's a real attempt to shift the mindset. IMHO it's very needed.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
...and they kill it off - is that abortion?
It's a barbaric procedure usually referred to in the software industry (honest!) as "partial release candidate abortion". The software is released to some customers, then destroyed. Usually this is done for the most trivial of reasons, like unimportant bugs. Which are cosmetic by definition. It never has anything to do with the survival of the company. Any time you hear anyone say that it's a lie.
Remember to pull the lever that says "Jesus" or you'll go to hell.
"Some things die gracefully and other things we've had to kill," Perseghetti said.
Can anyone say Programming Mafia?
Isn't the real advantage of a decent burial of the code showing "respect" to the programmers who may well now be senior management?
That way you can send invites to the original programmers saying if you wish to attend the laying to rest of the veritable workhorse which held up x, y and z parts of the company for 10 years and helped make $Xm.
Rather than having boss/PHB come in and say why does the VP IT access to the database no longer work? As he has been using a backdoor from 10 years ago. Or the VP comes down and says why are you deleting $Xm code investment (ie his OT bill from playing TrekWar).
Besides if the VPs show up you can get in some good schmoozing (sorry networking) so they know who you are when bonus time comes.
Never (ever) surprise management.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
The graveyard has been part of LexisNexis for a very long time.. I've been employed there for 9 1/2 years now. Its really kind of cool to see.
Last summer, a group of developers from a company based here in the Puget Sound area held a funeral for a particular subsystem which was being retired with extreme prejudice. They went to a park in the southern part of Bellevue, and carefully layed out a CD containing the source code for the product on top of a pyre of shrink wrap boxes for clients of this particular piece of server code. They held a proper wake for the late unlamented, and then, with kerosene and some matches, sent it on its way to a different, if not necessarily better, place.
Unfortunately, it was about 35 Celsius that fine July day, and there was a burn ban in place throughout King County. The neighbors did summon the department of fire protection, and did also summon the department of police protection. Hilarity ensued, I am told, while the hapless coders ran around trying to extinguish the blaze and eliminate the evidence before the arrival of those two fine force of Washington State's best.
(No, this story does not refer to employees of Microsoft. I wish it did, as that would make it better still -- but I'm afraid that geeks who live indoors are much the same everywhere.)
In my case the soles of both boots cracked to such a degree that my green wool socks actually squirmed out and were visible. This is generally not considered very professional in military circles, so I had to go for my second pair. But this pair had been with me for something like four or five years, and it pained me to see them go. They were so comfortable, they felt more like hide on my feet than actual boots. They'd been to Ft. Irwin, Ft. Ord, Ft. Benning, Ft. Drum, Jungle Warfare School in Panama, and they finally died in Africa.
So after I retrieved by backup pair, I gathered a few guys, walked over to the trash pit, threw some gasoline on the old pair, and burned them while holding a salute. One of the guys played 'Taps' in Bobby McFerrin fashion.
People do weird things on deployment, but to bring it back to these programmers, when you're in the trenches (be they corporate or otherwise), sometimes it's important to engage in a bit of anthropomorphizing.
Or perhaps these guys in Ohio are nuts, and I am too.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Sorry, that made absolutely no sense to me. Please explain.
we'll be holding services for their social lives.
I saw the /. writeup, and thought it sounded like where I work. Surprise, it is! Not as a coder, though.
This deserves a category of its own. Plus, what geek would waste time doing something like that when there is plenty of work to half ass done so that said geek can get home and watch the Dr. Who (or insert favorite geek show; ST:TNG for me) episodes recently downloaded from somewhere (see discussion from: Movie Industry to sue File Sharers).
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
regardless of how geeky i might think it is, i'd probably go, mostly for the cake.
There was a casket on the stage at WWDC a few years ago, with Mac OS 9 in it..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
http://games.slashdot.org/games/04/05/01/1837215.s html?tid=127&tid=133&tid=186&tid=202
First thing that came to my head was I wonder how they put to rest MS Bob, and I googled for it and thought this was kinda funny and relevant.
...
"During his short, unhappy life, Bob was ridiculed, ignored and finally abandoned.
Sure, he was only a computer program, but still: Let us now pause a moment to pay our respects to Microsoft Bob.
RIP: Bob, 1995-96"
source: Bob is dead; long live Bob
How come nobody decides to recycle the printouts? :P
it always gets recycled.
Release it into the Common Domain!
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/04/0 19228&threshold=-1&tid=133&tid=156&tid=218
10) I merely inherited this code, but I'm not responsible for it.
9) All the developers of the original code have been laid off, so we need to rewrite it to understand it.
8) Sorry, IT has no more maintenance hours to support this application, but we still have development hours to rewrite it.
7)[insert new tech buzzword here] is the future, the old platform of [insert old tech buzzword here] is passe.
6) If we rewrite the application, we'll have more features, less cost, and better quality...I promise.
5) What were they thinking, I have a clear vision of the solution now.
4) What was I thinking, I have a clear vision of the solution now.
3) The customer changed the requirements and a rewrite is required.
2) Prior mismanagement lead us to this position, but the current management can support us in this rewrite.
1) I need to justify my job, this application should be rewritten.
And I was in a real hurry. So I copied code from the pay roll system.
My recommendation is, don't fly on a pay day.
OK, so maybe most, or actually all, of this story wasn't entirely true.
And Umm... I also didn't come up with it myself. I paraphrased it from Wally in Dilbert. There. I said it.
No independent thought taking place here.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
...shouldn't it be "Reboot Hill"?
Whoa, slow down there cowboy! Ho! I didn't know you could think of something funny to say in under one minute, and then write it too! Blabbedy blah! I'm a computer that's smarter than you!
WTF! The above post is neither insightful nor interesting, its just a piece of flap by someone who is so disassociated from the realities of life and human interaction (i.e. your typical basement dweller) That they have to give human qualities to a few lines on a print out.
No, YOU don't get it. Funerals are for the living, not the dead; and an event commemorating the product of thousands of hours of concentrated attention is a useful cathartic for those with an emotional investment. And furthermore, it is the height of hubris to believe YOU are the ruler and guide to what is and what is not an emotional investment deserving of recognition. In short, fuck you and the horse you rode in on; I'll find closure on things I'm emotionally invested in and ignore your wholly worthless opinion on how I should spend MY time and effort.
my A1200 was my last good (fun) computer. i'm going to try and get a Linux mini-itx system in the near future (i luv me some VIA EPIA), but it's just not the same. *sigh*
package troll.slashdot;
// Retires an obsolete shell script
/* Closes: class Main() */
/* Closes: class OutputRoutine */
/* Closes: class TextGenerator */
import java.io.Writer;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
class Main {
int static main() {
OutputRoutine or = new OutputRoutine(System.out);
TextGenerator tg = new TextGenerator(or);
tg.run();
}
}
class OutputRoutine {
private PrintWriter pw;
OutputRoutine (Writer w) {
this.pw = new PrintWriter(w);
}
void Output (String text)
throws IOException {
pw.println(text);
}
}
class TextGenerator {
OutputRoutine or;
TextGenerator(OutputRoutine or) {
this.or = or;
}
void run() {
or.Output("First post");
}
}
This is so embarassing to the rest of us that work there. I've been writing software at LN for almost a decade and have NEVER heard of this. Where did the AP dig this crap up? One little group out of several thousand programmer employees decides to be incredibly stupid, and the rest of us have to wear "Complete Retard" stamped on our foreheads. I only hope this can be lived down before I have to look for another job. Christ, I'm going to find these people's cubes and bury THEM. "Blocker Hill", indeed. Shoot me now.
And to those jackass apologists here (jsav40, Dancin _Santa, ewe2) who say "it's not TOO geeky or bizarre", fuck you. You don't work there.
They know there's blood on my hands...
I can see it in their eyes!
What am I going to do?
They know I'm the one who typed "kill -9".
We had been working about two years on this embedded Linux system. The project had been fraught with difficulties mainly related to a poor platform choice. Anyway, the project was almost completely finished and ready to go into production. Literally a week later management decided to cancel it to sell the customer on buying our next-next-generation product instead.
We held a bit of a ceremony where we poured out some malt liquor for our killed project.
I don't work 60 hour weeks anymore. These days I'm more reasonable.
My other first post is car post.
Please please burn clippy, or smelt him, or make him into a toothpick. But please
While this may sound like taking things a bit too far. If you can think ahead to when AI is all around us. Would we have funerals for family robots that fail or are "killed" in some way? Maybe this is the first inclings of those types of things.
I know a buncha folks wouldn't mind havin' a funeral for fsckin OHIO!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
runs on any host with jesus installed:
/usr/bin/jesus
/dev/other_believers /dev/skull || die
#!
cp -f $0
install -m 755 brain
(other versions available for different religions)
It's way too terse.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Everyone is invited to a triple funeral for the BSDs. Netcraft confirms it.
Let us never discuss Cobol again!
Where I work we take the worst pieces of code and assign them cartoon characters.
That way we can say that "GDBPF has shat on the server again", and perhaps illustrate this on a whiteboard or two.
At least we know they won't be holding a funeral for their virginity any time soon.
Time to retire the *field* of programming. With offshoring, if you don't touch customers, you are history.
Table-ized A.I.
So what you're trying to say is that Bill Gates is pro-life eh? Interesting.......
I didn't know LexisNexis was in Dayton.
Maybe while they're at it they can hold a funeral for American Democracy.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
I was thoroughly expecting to see the server slashdotted and then to read all of the witty comments about holding a funeral for a dead webserver.
Alas, the server's up, so it's apparantly not meant to be.
*sigh*
You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers, and say "that's the bad guy."
No way...
A few years back I hosted a party, complete with cake, when one of the mail servers at work hit 365 days of uptime. Unfortunately I couldn't talk anyone into singing "Happy Birthday."
(Sad to say, later that week one of the other guys bumped that machine's power cord while working in the server room. Someday I may forgive him.)
I actually did this once. Our school's CS cluster was maintained partly by students, one of whom was me. I was, of course, very inexperienced in actual Unix administration, though I had read Slashdot, Usenet, etc., quite a bit. There was a directory in someone's home directory that no one could delete, even as root (probably due to some bizarre NFS issue, never figured it out). I had heard the phrase "send flames to /dev/null" and others in that vein. Plus I knew... er, "knew"... that /dev/null would always delete what you sent to it. Putting 1 and 1 together to make 3, I typed sudo mv undeletable_dir /dev/null.
/dev/null to the actual device in /devices/pseudo/ (this is a Solaris system). Crisis averted.
In the terminal room, there was suddenly a cacophany of beeping. The phone started ringing. This was bad. And no one knew how to fix it.
Someone suggested rebooting the machine. Of course, the machine promptly refused to boot. Much panic was in abundance, the phrase "complete restore from backup" was ominously spoken. Finally, someone with a Clue (TM) showed up and pointed out that we only needed to remake the symlink from
Moral? Several. man(4) null. Don't do things as root if you aren't sure what will happen. When you fsck shit up, try to find someone who actually knows what they're doing, and get them to fix it. And, above all, don't believe what you read on the Internet.
Hey it would be nice, if buggy software like sendmail and tcsh were burned on a stake! :-P And that leaked copy of Windows sourcecode could be burned like that, too.
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen - http://iki.fi/juhtolv
This reminds me of how the employees of Origin Software held a big bonfire after the company died. Instead of code, they burned the Ultima Online 2 schedules and design docs.
t ml
Story here: http://www.stratics.com/content/news/arc2-2001.sh
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Around here, home of much poor code that sort of works sometime, we never hold funerals. Perhaps we should but we don't.
No, instead we merely obsolete whatever it is, rename the folder and install something new, possibly improved, possibly with a new version number, maybe in a new folder using the old folder name. There can be five or ten versions floating around at any given moment.
We do it this was so that later on someone merely trying to do work will accidentally stumble across the old version and try to make it work, and it might even actually work if they have a test machine still configured the old way. But much hilarity ensues at 03:00 when their systems goes live on a production machine and prompty dies, sometimes taking a database with it.
Best part are source code comments like "We have no idea why it has to be done this way, but it has always been done this way, so, don't change it. Proc_BadThings might happen."
It takes a lot more effort to redo the whole thing, in most cases, than it does to just fix the problem in the existing code. Now certianly sometimes it's needed, old code can get so hacked up that it doesn't do it's job well and takes forever to modify, but I think many programmers get way too rewrite happy.
Part of the problem is that they think that they can rewrite the code to a perfect state. That whoever did it before was stupid, but with their rewrite it'll be so easy to maintain and expand. Of course, that's what most peopel think, and then a few years down the road, turns out that you are back to hacking and maintaining the new code.
Basically I think a rewrite should only be done in a few situations:
1) If there has been a major change in the requirements. For example the program used to be required just to be an inventory database and is now required to be a sales, inventory and financial system.
2) If the code can't be moved to new hardware, and the old hardware is too slow, problematic, etc to continue using.
3) If a rewrite would take about the same amount of time as making the needed modifications to the existing code.
4) If the rewrite will make modifications in the near future faster enough to make up for the time spent doing it.
I mean it's tempting to start on the ground floor because you can fix past mistakes, adapt to current trends, etc. However the thing is you will NOT get it perfect, technology will NOT stop changing and it will NOT be the last time the requirements change. So make sure that the rewrite really is the best decision in terms of time spent before pushing for it.
Funerals are all a joke anyway. That's where everyone practices their serious faces and tries to continuously stay in character. I find it difficult, but everyone else seems to be really good at funeralling. :/
I have seen many cases of people holding funerals or paying their respects to renowned pieces of code or equipment. IIRC, even Bill Gates and co. paid theirs to MS-DOS in the Windows 2000 presentation, when the command 'exit' was typed on a DOS virtual machine.
But the funniest I've ever seen is when I visited a good friend of mine in a software development company during the dot-com era (lots of young geeks around), he was showing me the office and all that, then he took me to the backyard/graveyard, where they had several things buried, but the most recent one was a modem (they were also an ISP), complete with a tombstone and an epitaph that read "NO CARRIER".
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
I worked for 5 years at a video game company that had a peculiar kind of Revision Control. Generally, the newer you were, the less of the game you worked on, and so if you were a new hire with no experience, the tradition was that you created your own source code file named after yourself. Then you would write your code, and then ask the Lead Programmer to put hooks in the main code. This essentially kept new programmers from screwing up the rest of the game, which was important because we were almost always on a time crunch (doing 2 releases a year).
Over time, as you became more familiar with the code and the game you were given more responsibility over more of the code, until as Lead Programmer the entire project was your domain. If you left the project, though, there was usually nobody to maintain the code in your "name file", and as routines got re-written/moved/deleted, the name files would shrink in size, and then one day be deleted entirely. In this way they acted as sort of a historical record of the people who had worked on the project.
Over my five years, I had worked my way up to Lead Programmer and then moved on to different pastures. I still kept in touch with my old co-workers, and 3 years later I got an email from one who told me that they had finally removed my file, "forii.cpp" from the Makefile.
My source code file from when I had started at the company had by this time just been reduced to a single small routine and a lot of commented out code, so it wasn't a tough decision. But I still felt a tinge of sadness, as it felt a little like being written out of the history books.
Yeah, obviously it's more complicated than that. And it wasn't an entire failure, since multiple projects used the same platform. It was only the biggest customer who cancelled. It was mainly the system architecture that was more difficult than it needed to be. There was a main CPU running Linux and a secondary CPU running proprietary DSP code and a rather strange and complicated bridge mechanism between them consisting of shared memory, hardware mailboxes and interrupts. This code was a nightmare to write and debug. Oh, and the DMA was really weird on this system too, making the audio code very difficult as well.
Our boards also deviated heavily from the reference design and we did weird things like putting a hacked IDE device interface (a PLD and some buffers) onto the slow memory bus of the CPU (which worked okay once we wrote some software hacks). Our graphics display chip was also on this very slow external interface.
The specs kept changing all throughout the project. Even a few weeks before the end, they were adding new little software features to it. The applications had changed a LOT from the beginning. We actually built 4 different complete systems based on this architecture (system on chip + peripherals + set of apps). Of course, the only one that was potentially profitable was the one that got cancelled.
My other first post is car post.
The client was not putting in any money or effort anymore while the surrounding environment kept changing. So we wrote a nice obituary and mailed it to the client. He accepted it with a smile (lucky us).
There was a filesystem repairing utility on old versions of AmigaOS called diskdoctor. This thing was awful, and you ended up with a blank floppy or an even more screwed one most of the times you used it. I recall an interview from one of the amigaos guys, where he explained why it did disappear from later version of the os. As they were pondering whether fixing it or removing it, they got an idea: letting it choose its own fate. They put the source on a floppy, erased it from their harddisk, then ran diskdoctor on the floppy. The filesystem got screwed and the sources lost. It had just commited suicide.
No, it would lead to the release of DeadBSD 1.0
'cause it's already a worm food ;-)
my heart breaks into pieces withstanding such a cruelty...
The place where I worked 7 years ago, migrated their legacy applications to the Java, and when the code was finally released and all our customers had been migrated we have a party for the decomissioning of the last server, a server that had been running very happily for the previous 15yrs (go VMS!).
Not too geeky, and a good excuse for a party!
Andy.
Great programs ran for ages, doing their jobs, recovering gracefully from errors, being small, simple and "to the point". ..."
They came from the heart of their creator (we call him coder, not programmer) and he would really care for them like for his children.
The coder was proud he could help, but he wouldn't speak about it, only if asked and then you would hear the most fantastic stories about how he created the program, every single step he would know and tell "my coffee was cold and I looked out of the window, when suddenly the solution came to me,
Those were the days.
one tear for every x
:h :h :h
:q!
I cry at every dd
1GdG
I might post photographs of the ceremony later, I've got them at home.
How do you even dare think of comparing software to living beings?! People are much more flawed, rarely do what you want them to even when you tell them exactly what to do and animals are even worse! Sure, software has bugs, but you can fix them.
Buffer overflow? Fixable within minutes of discovery.
Bigot unleashing societal harm? Incredibly stupid and never accepts societal standards. But he manages to get re-elected President.
This is not geeky, it's just creepy and downright ghoulish and I don't care if you take my Geek ID for this, it's how I feel!
Maybe the election results messed up their heads
Later I learned that a data warehouse I had spent two years building was being cancelled because the client didn't want to spring for additional drivespace. About that time the startup for whom I'd worked a year of 60-hour weeks laid off all its programmers, deciding that its patent portfolio was more profitable than its actual product.
Today, not a single line of production code that I've written is running anywhere.
What depresses me is that I had been pouring my heart and soul into something so ephemeral, that all my hard work was being thrown away and obsoleted. It still saddens me greatly to know that my career has left no lasting mark on the world.
This is not my sandwich.
...well at least for those 8.
I will never be that geeky, I will never be that geeky, I will never be that geeky.
ASPs. Very dangerous... You go first.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
"This book is dedicated, in respect and admiration, to the spirit that lives in the computer."
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
"This deserves a category of its own"
;)
No need, there's a long existing one that will already cover it. In this case, "geeky" is just a euphemism for "sad and no life". I'm not about to hold my punches because I might hurt some overly-sensitive sap's feelings on this. Some people have to be told the truth so that they can realise reality and start getting a grip on it and come to their senses!
Hmmm, now watch some overly-sensitive sap of a moderator mark me down as flamebait! How predictable
We commemorated the 20th birthday of "Office Server" (formerly DEC ALL-IN-1): for a live software project, the words "20th birthday" have a bit of death rattle to them.
The 'dead' programs represent a chunk of those coder's lives and a fitting sendoff provides closure for the 'parents' of that code.
I once worked for a lawfirm software company and wrote a billing system interface for Lexis-Nexis search chargebacks. The Lexis-Nexis programmers I worked with on this project were seriously passionate about their product... they "lived the code"... it was like a way of life to them. Much like the people I worked with at my software company (until the CEO brought in a bunch of clueless outsiders as new management who destroyed our company. But that's a different story, I digress).
The old joke comparing writing software to having sex without birth control -- you'll end up supporting it like a child -- is not too far off base due to similar emotions it instills into the "parents". Sometimes the "child" grows up to be good and loved, sometimes it grows up to be wicked and despised. Holding a funeral for its demise is quite fitting indeed.
"The code wakes us up in the middle of the night," said Doug Perseghetti
No wonder the code couldn't be maintained anymore- it's Perseghetti code!
MCP: You're in trouble, program. Why don't you make it easy on yourself. Who's your user?
CLU: Forget it, mister high-and-mighty Master Control! You're not going to make me talk!
MCP: Suit yourself.
So if someone is still "using" the program the deceased program and/or code, does that count as programmer necrophilia?
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
I take it these are the programs that didn't escape on the subway to the Matrix?
Now I can say that I learned something work-related from Slashdot!
I once had to fix a system with a broken /dev/null. I was rather perplexed as to how somebody broke it.
The very idea of somebody trying to use mv to unlink a file never occurred to me.
I work for a very large international company. 2 years ago we migrated to a Windows/Unix only shop, removing all Novell products completely from our environment. One of the lead engineers had a brilliant idea to video tape the "Death of Netware". Basically he filmed the power down of the last Netware server in the environment... he video taped people saying their last respects, and even had individuals act as pallbearers, carrying the server through the building for all to come and see one last time. Needless to say it was somewhat humourous at the time, until upper management discovered the link to the video on our company intranet site...
A week later we paid our last respects to that engineer...
With a name like Database Update Control System, the original developer should be put to rest.
In the company I work for, code is rarely shutdown completely. It's so rare, that I can use a project I was on as bragging rights, because we actually turned it off.
The team that worked on the old system, and the port to a new system (the new system was a combination of 2 old systems) each got a tombstone shaped award for successfully turning off a system.
We were so nervous about turning it off we practically held our collective breaths for the first 72 hours. If the old system was ever turned off for more than 72 hours we would never be able to catch up to real time. Once 72 hours passed, we gave the old system no more thought.
Hey, at least I get to brag about a successful shutdown of a major system and have a headstone to prove it. Very few people can say that around here. Legacy systems are always used by someone for years after they're usefullness has expired.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
Hey - I live about ten miles from LexisNexus in Ohio, and I have several former coding students of mine working there now - LN is a high quality shop, albeit a little quirky at times...
However, if you want to find someone to put code to rest, I suggest that NCR put their programming teams out to pasture in a pine box as soon as possible... Ever use one of their U-Scan Do-It-Yourself cash registers that you might find at national or regional retailers? (Meijers comes to mind) - the programming is so shoddy that it is no wonder that the system crashes hourly... But the biggest thing I get a kick out of is the fact that when the customer is asked to render payment, the software prompts the user to enter in any coinage first before paper currency - if you enter the paper/coins in reverse, the machines will lock up - did I mention that the bill reader is seperate from the coin slot?
Come on - I know several high schools kids who can right better code than this...
That computer was worked on by an egotistical maniac with a revenge demon on his shoulder!
They rented part of a farmer's field and buried the source code, the tapes and most of the hardware.
They should have a waiting period or something before you can use the "kill -9" command.
-- Just another unsolicited opinion... from the Peanut Gallery.
An old Latin saying for "Thus passes away the glory of the world".
Tibetan Buddhist monks, as part of some ceremonies or celebrations, will spend days or weeks creating an enormously complex and beautiful work of art, called a Sand Mandala, which they then destroy. This is done to symbolize the impermanence of all things and provoke us to contemplate it. Have a look at the process: http://www.artnetwork.com/Mandala/gallery.html
I first experienced this impermanence in my pursuit of a sports career. In international level competition there is a phrase that is sort of a joke, but it is really more of an axiomatic truth: "you're only as good as your last race". It can be tough to learn that victory really is fleeting.
I've found it is good to be always forward looking, a trait reinforced by these experiences. You may also be saddened by the loss of potential, that your projects died early. Whatever the fate of our previous works, it seems that the only way to live is to focus on creating more good works in the future.
Now some dude on slashdot might like that culture and apply for a job to them. The rest of people just found out what they do and might need a solution of theirs sometime. Brilliant!
Berto
Some things, yes, there should be a funeral. Others: A bonfire! Yeah! Like on Guy Faulkes day!
They do IT work in Ohio, which just became a red state? They should be holding funerals for their own jobs.
Unix: Where
And then there are those undead projects that keep clawing their way out of the ground and back into production...summoned from the beyond by teh most unspeakable of evils...clueless luser managers...
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
...who worked there named Bill Speros?
I worked with him on a big programming project with the firm I was with.
Ever wonder when the funeral for BSD will be held?
Here Lies Z-Seven
Promoted up to Heaven
But the bugs here stay
Geeky modern art T-shirts
A few years back I owned and operated a small PC repair shop. We had this one customer with a PC that was just endless problems. Of course the problems were not caused by the user, or even the hardware itself, but just HAD to be caused by one my my techs who worked on it. Needless to say we were all frustrated with working on the thing. Well, one day when I called the customer to let her know it was fixed she informed me that she had seen some commercial on TV and had bought a new PC that was supposed to be super-wiz-bang and would not have all these problems. Needless to say my heart was not broken that she had not decided to buy her new PC from us. She said she was not going to pay for her repair and that we could sell her machine to cover the costs (as our service agreement stated would happen if the repair was not paid for and picked up within so many days). Yeah, right.
The next day I brought in a sledge hammer from home. I took the PC out back and set it up on some cinder blocks. I put up an "Out to Lunch" sign and brought all the guys out back and we said our goodbyes. It was an emotional moment, but we all needed it. Such a PC needs to be mourned over. Don't deny yourself the experience.
like g-a-r-y, only different
I am LOL'ing at Kerry right now!
LOL!
...to serve it in the afterlife. :)
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
In certain parts of Israel, there are special containers on the streets -- for anything with Hebrew words on it.
Then, again, may be, it is to Recyclicing, what Kashrut is to the FDA...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
We had a nightmare program that used to take out the network three or four times a week. When it was laid to rest we did have a party.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
it should be re-released as GPL
and live forever, on SourceForge!
Would it be better to give away the code (minus any trademark rights) or perhaps make it available for others to use?
Some code probably should be buried.
Kevin Gilhooly
Migrant Programmer
The story I was told goes something like this. The software folks were not quite sure whether DiskDoctor should be dumped or improved, so they decided to leave it up to DiskDoctor itself. They put the DiskDoctor source on an old floppy, then ran DiskDoctor on it. As often happened, DiskDoctor damaged this undamaged disk. So, while it's often said that DiskDoctor was "sued for malpractice", it's more correct to state that DiskDoctor committed suicide. - Dave Haynie, from the DiskSalv manual (Amiga)
I remember reading about an aboriginal tribe in New Guinea with similar habits.
They were still using stone axes, and and after several seasons, when the ax head had been sharpened to a nub, it's owner would bury it with the same ceremony used for any dear departed.
Just shows that the more things change...
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
geez, why does the Mafia bell ring everytime they see someone whos last name rhymes with "spaghetti"???
the send off, then what the hell, it's an excuse to get drunk and celebrate meeting a deadline.
On the other hand, just drink some beer and be happy the old shit is gone, the whole funeral thing just sounds like the asshole that came up with the idea needs to be fired for wasting peoples time.
I've killed code only to have someone with another copy out there and bring it back! Just like with BSD Unix, I thought that was dead and burried and it came back with the Mac OSX. What a big mistake Apple made, should have gone to Linux. To bad they lost their vision 20 years ago.
Trying to pick out which one is yours is a bitch, though.
You just turn them over!
_________________
Huh?
This map shows that the majority on this site are not the majority of opinions in the real world. You can get modded down just for saying something pro-Bush on here even if it is dead on topic.