OSDev.org

"Programming is Terrible: Lessons learned from a life wasted" (possibly NSFW from mild profanity)

There are several things relevant to this forum in the talk, most notably the comments on Conway's Law (10:20), bikeshedding (11:30) and Goon Projects (12:40). This last one will be very, very familiar to the veterans of this group. He also talks about being willing to throw away code and writing code with the assumption that it won't be right (40:50).

Finally, if you want to lose any faith you ever had in the IT industry, go to 43:00. You might want to put a pillow under your jaw so that you don't get bruised when it hits the floor.

Schol-R-LEA wrote:Finally, if you want to lose any faith you ever had in the IT industry, go to 43:00. You might want to put a pillow under your jaw so that you don't get bruised when it hits the floor.

Weeeeell...

Yes, nice anecdote, but not any proof for the point he was trying to make (that experienced programmers are more prone to these kind of mistakes than newbies).

In my experience, mistakes like the ones he is talking about happen all over the place, but the veterans have heard about (or experienced) the common ones and avoid them. Of course, that means they're just making the not so common mistakes instead. (*)

And, if you want to go language lawyer, C++ does not have a concept of "heap", and talks about "stack" only in the context of exceptions and stack unwinding. The difference is made between automatic vs. dynamic storage duration, which can or can not be implemented by stack / heap concepts but really being orthogonal to that; I would expect a lecturer to be specific about the difference. And so I can readily see two people talking right past each other, with either one leaving the room with the thought "what a noob" in their head.

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(*): About 15 years ago I kicked of Pro-POS, which definitely got its share of bikeshedding and group project malaise going on, so guilty as pleaded. I'd commit completely different muckups today.