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?
10 PRINT "He's dead, Jim."
20 BEEP
30 GOTO 10
RUN
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.
#!/bin/sh
echo "first post"
I cant wait for the day that ASP.NET has it's funeral... so I can pay my disrespects.
TOO Geeky? No way! Just look at this: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/01/183721 5Z
It was such a nice program . . . sniff sniff. I remember when I wrote this line here . . . fixed a bug that crashed the server.
BASIC has joined BSD and Bob Hope on the "B" team. We wish them the best in their new endeavours, wherever they may be.
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
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Make sure all old outdated code is surrounded by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.
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.
"Some things die gracefully and other things we've had to kill," Perseghetti said.
Can anyone say Programming Mafia?
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.)
we'll be holding services for their social lives.
Isn't the real advantage of a decent burial of the code showing "respect" to the programmers who may well now be senior management?
Look, I don't know if it's the same every where or not, but the reason programmers get moved to upper management ( and out of the development cycle ) around here is because they can do less damage there.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I saw the /. writeup, and thought it sounded like where I work. Surprise, it is! Not as a coder, though.
regardless of how geeky i might think it is, i'd probably go, mostly for the cake.
http://games.slashdot.org/games/04/05/01/1837215.s html?tid=127&tid=133&tid=186&tid=202
How come nobody decides to recycle the printouts? :P
A pet has more of a soul than any anonymous coward.
0xdeadbeef is a new one. I always see 0xbaadf00d. I suppose 0xdeadbeef is 0xbaadf00d?
But anonymous cowards do make pretty good pets. Trying to pick out which one is yours is a bitch, though.
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"?
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");
}
}
Please please burn clippy, or smelt him, or make him into a toothpick. But please
Which is exactly why the code is being retired :).
In related news, anyone want to go to a dachshund funeral? They'll probably need to schedule one next week sometime.
John
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.
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."
They took your stapler, didn't they?
Elmo knows where you live!
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!!!
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.
'cause it's already a worm food ;-)
my heart breaks into pieces withstanding such a cruelty...
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.
Sure they have soul, but they dont have rhythm and blues.
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.,
Here's another moral: learning Unix administration on Slashdot is like learning emergency medicine by watching ER.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Hey I get all my system administration skills from running gags found on Slashdot! For example my firewall only blocks IP packets with the "evil bit" set; This is far more effecient.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.