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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......."
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.
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.
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
it always gets recycled.
How come nobody decides to recycle the printouts? :P
Because recycled printouts might lead to Microsoft code...
(For those young 'uns, Bill Gates used to dumpster dive for old program listings to help his programming skills. Personally, I would prefer to learn from code the programmers thought worth keeping, and not what they threw away, but to each his own I guess...)
A dingo ate my sig...
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.
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.
Right now I'm rewriting several thousand lines of dlsh script. It's been a legacy I've had to deal with for five years now, and I've finally gotten tired of it. No one uses dlsh. It's archaic. It's not sh based, it's not csh based, it's or horrible proprietary shell existing in a world where proprietary shells do not belong.
So Monday my boss asks me what I'm doing:
Boss: "What else is up besides the ABC project?"
Me: "I'm rewriting the XYZ script in bash."
Boss: [stunned silence] "Is that necessary?"
Me: "I'll sleep better at night."
Boss: "Okay then, go for it."
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
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.
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.