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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.
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...
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 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.