Work du Soleil has found a kindred spirit in Still Drinking.
Repost from: http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Every friend I have with a job that involves
picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week
eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation:
"Bro,
you don't work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver."
They
have a point. Mordor sucks, and it's certainly more physically taxing
to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you're an ant. But, for
the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad
things? Awesome. Welcome to programming.
All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people
Imagine joining an engineering team. You're excited and full of
ideas, probably just out of school and a world of clean, beautiful
designs, awe-inspiring in their aesthetic unity of purpose, economy, and
strength. You start by meeting Mary, project leader for a bridge in a
major metropolitan area. Mary introduces you to Fred, after you get
through the fifteen security checks installed by Dave because Dave had
his sweater stolen off his desk once and Never Again. Fred only works
with wood, so you ask why he's involved because this bridge is supposed
to allow rush-hour traffic full of cars full of mortal humans to cross a
200-foot drop over rapids. Don't worry, says Mary, Fred's going to
handle the walkways. What walkways? Well Fred made a good case for
walkways and they're going to add to the bridge's appeal. Of course,
they'll have to be built without railings, because there's a strict no
railings rule enforced by Phil, who's not an engineer. Nobody's sure
what Phil does, but it's definitely full of synergy and has to do with
upper management, whom none of the engineers want to deal with so they
just let Phil do what he wants. Sara, meanwhile, has found several
hemorrhaging-edge paving techniques, and worked them all into the bridge
design, so you'll have to build around each one as the bridge
progresses, since each one means different underlying support and safety
concerns. Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have
an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and
it's become a case of "whoever got to that part of the design first."
This has been such a headache for the people actually screwing things
together, they've given up and just forced, hammered, or welded their
way through the day with whatever parts were handy. Also, the bridge was
designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a
suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added
extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the
suspension cables because they're still sort of holding up parts of the
bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody's pretty sure they're
important parts. After the introductions are made, you are invited to
come up with some new ideas, but you don't have any because you're a
propulsion engineer and don't know anything about bridges.
Would
you drive across this bridge? No. If it somehow got built, everybody
involved would be executed. Yet some version of this dynamic wrote every
single program you have ever used, banking software, websites, and a
ubiquitously used program that was supposed to protect information on
the internet but didn't.
All code is bad
Every programmer occasionally, when nobody's home, turns off the
lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica,
and opens up a file on their computer. It's a different file for every
programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew
they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty,
then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and
the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.
This
file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions
and variables. It's concise. It doesn't do anything obviously stupid. It
has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does
exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was
written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like
poetry written by someone over thirty.
Every programmer starts out
writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they're told on
Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so
they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try
to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who
melts it and then all the programmers' snowflakes get dumped together
in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because
nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken
snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels
more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.
There's a
theory that you can cure this by following standards, except there are
more "standards" than there are things computers can actually do, and
these standards are all variously improved and maligned by the personal
preferences of the people coding them, so no collection of code has ever
made it into the real world without doing a few dozen identical things a
few dozen not even remotely similar ways. The first few weeks of any
job are just figuring out how a program works even if you're familiar
with every single language, framework, and standard that's involved,
because standards are unicorns.
There will always be darkness
I spent a few years growing up with a closet in my bedroom. The
closet had an odd design. It looked normal at first, then you walked in
to do closet things, and discovered that the wall on your right gave way
to an alcove, making for a handy little shelf. Then you looked up, and
the wall at the back of the alcove gave way again, into a crawlspace of
utter nothingness, where no light could fall and which you immediately
identified as the daytime retreat for every ravenous monster you kept at
bay with flashlights and stuffed animals each night.
This is what
it is to learn programming. You get to know your useful tools, then you
look around, and there are some handy new tools nearby and those tools
show you the bottomless horror that was always right next to your bed.
For
example, say you're an average web developer. You're familiar with a
dozen programming languages, tons of helpful libraries, standards,
protocols, what have you. You still have to learn more at the rate of
about one a week, and remember to check the hundreds of things you know
to see if they've been updated or broken and make sure they all still
work together and that nobody fixed the bug in one of them that you
exploited to do something you thought was really clever one weekend when
you were drunk. You're all up to date, so that's cool, then everything
breaks.
"Double you tee eff?" you say, and start hunting for the
problem. You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since
another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just
use that as a shorthand for "Infinity" when simplifying their code. Then
a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the
original idiot should have decided, but since he didn't, the non-idiot
decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler.
Then he decided he wasn't going to tell anyone that this was an error,
because he's a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can't
even find the cat.
You are an expert in all these technologies,
and that's a good thing, because that expertise let you spend only six
hours figuring out what went wrong, as opposed to losing your job. You
now have one extra little fact to tuck away in the millions of little
facts you have to memorize because so many of the programs you depend on
are written by dicks and idiots.
And that's just in your own
chosen field, which represents such a tiny fraction of all the things
there are to know in computer science you might as well never have
learned anything at all. Not a single living person knows how everything
in your five-year-old MacBook actually works. Why do we tell you to
turn it off and on again? Because we don't have the slightest clue
what's wrong with it, and it's really easy to induce coma in computers
and have their built-in team of automatic doctors try to figure it out
for us. The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders'
computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children
with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad.
A lot of work is done on the internet and the internet is its own special hellscape
Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is
that except it's literally a billion times worse. Websites that are
glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained
by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is
breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who
works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and
frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade
collapses. There's a team at a Google office that hasn't slept in three
days. Somewhere there's a database programmer surrounded by empty
Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she's dead. And if these
people stop, the world burns. Most people don't even know what sysadmins
do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they
wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting
your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
You can't restart
the internet. Trillions of dollars depend on a rickety cobweb of
unofficial agreements and "good enough for now" code with comments like
"TODO: FIX THIS IT'S A REALLY DANGEROUS HACK BUT I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S
WRONG" that were written ten years ago. I haven't even mentioned the
legions of people attacking various parts of the internet for espionage
and profit or because they're bored. Ever heard of 4chan? 4chan might
destroy your life and business because they decided they didn't like you
for an afternoon, and we don't even worry about 4chan because another
nuke doesn't make that much difference in a nuclear winter.
On the
internet, it's okay to say, "You know, this kind of works some of the
time if you're using the right technology," and BAM! it's part of the
internet now. Anybody with a couple of hundred dollars and a computer
can snag a little bit of the internet and put up whatever awful chunks
of hack code they want and then attach their little bit to a bunch of
big bits and everything gets a little bit worse. Even the good coders
don't bother to learn the arcane specifications outlined by the
organizations people set up to implement some unicorns, so everybody
spends half their time coping with the fact that nothing matches
anything or makes any sense and might break at any time and we just try
to cover it up and hope no one notices.
Here are the secret rules
of the internet: five minutes after you open a web browser for the first
time, a kid in Russia has your social security number. Did you sign up
for something? A computer at the NSA now automatically tracks your
physical location for the rest of your life. Sent an email? Your email
address just went up on a billboard in Nigeria.
These things
aren't true because we don't care and don't try to stop them, they're
true because everything is broken because there's no good code and
everybody's just trying to keep it running. That's your job if you work
with the internet: hoping the last thing you wrote is good enough to
survive for a few hours so you can eat dinner and catch a nap.
We didn't start out crazy, we're being driven crazy
ERROR: Attempted to parse HTML with regular expression; system returned Cthulhu.
Funny, right? No? How about this exchange:
"Is that called arrayReverse?"
"s/camel/_/"
"Cool thanks."
Wasn't that guy helpful? With the camel? Doesn't that seem like an
appropriate response? No? Good. You can still find Jesus. You have not
yet spent so much of your life reading code that you begin to talk in
it. The human brain isn't particularly good at basic logic and now
there's a whole career in doing nothing but really, really complex
logic. Vast chains of abstract conditions and requirements have to be
picked through to discover things like missing commas. Doing this all
day leaves you in a state of mild aphasia as you look at people's faces
while they're speaking and you don't know they've finished because
there's no semicolon. You immerse yourself in a world of total
meaninglessness where all that matters is a little series of numbers
went into a giant labyrinth of symbols and a different series of numbers
or a picture of a kitten came out the other end.
The destructive impact on the brain is demonstrated by the programming languages people write. This is a program:
#include <iostream>
int main( int argc, char** argv ) {
std::cout << "Hello World!" << std::endl;
return 0;
}
That program does exactly the same thing as this program:
`r```````````.H.e.l.l.o. .w.o.r.l.di
And this program:
>+++++++++[<++++++++>-]<.>+++++++[<++++>-]<+.+++++++..+++.[-]
>++++++++[<++++>-] <.>+++++++++++[<++++++++>-]<-.--------.+++
.------.--------.[-]>++++++++[<++++>- ]<+.[-]++++++++++.
And this one:
Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook.
Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook?
Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook.
Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook.
Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook.
Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook!
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook.
And once somebody wrote a programming language that let somebody else write this:
#:: ::-| ::-| .-. :||-:: 0-| .-| ::||-| .:|-. :||
open(Q,$0);while(){if(/^#(.*)$/){for(split('-',$1)){$q=0;for(split){s/|
/:.:/xg;s/:/../g;$Q=$_?length:$_;$q+=$q?$Q:$Q*20;}print chr($q);}}}print"n";
#.: ::||-| .||-| :|||-| ::||-| ||-:: :|||-| .:|
According to the author, that program is "two lines of code that
parse two lines of embedded comments in the code to read the Mayan
numbers representing the individual ASCII characters that make up the
magazine title, rendered in 90-degree rotated ASCII art."
That
program won a contest, because of course it did. Do you want to live in a
world like this? No. This is a world of where you can smoke a pack a
day and nobody even questions it. "Of course he smokes a pack a day, who
wouldn't?" Eventually every programmer wakes up and before they're
fully conscious they see their whole world and every relationship in it
as chunks of code, and they trade stories about it as if sleepiness
triggering acid trips is a normal thing that happens to people. This is a
world where people eschew sex to write a programming language for
orangutans. All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains
were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten
to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them
is slowly going mad.
</rant>
So no, I'm not required to be able to lift objects
weighing up to fifty pounds. I traded that for the opportunity to trim
Satan's pubic hair while he dines out of my open skull so a few bits of
the internet will continue to work for a few more days.
