[threatripper]

Is this real? It can't be real. Nobody can be this stupid. But then again it takes a special kind of person who doesn't understand satire to actually do something like that. Somebody, where they would say "we trained him wrong on purpose as a kind of a joke".

[cdirkx]

Nah I've seen this happen IRL. In this system "configuration" was read out of tables in a word document, processed via XSLT transformations and eventually it would spit out a huuuuge single C# document (recent "improvement", before that it was some obscure licenced language). Builds happened overnight because they took so long, and there was no way to test something locally.

The "advantage" of this system was that there was no need for programmers, as there was "no code", just configuration!. This was supposed to allowed "domain experts" without programming knowledge to work with the system. However a month long training by the creator of the system was still required, as he had to explain which of the 7 boolean types you should use if you wanted to add a new column 0.o (for those who want to know, there was true/false, 0/1, yes/no, true/false/unknown, true/false rendered as a toggle, true/false rendered as a checkbox...)

[spacechild1]

> In this system "configuration" was read out of tables in a word document, processed via XSLT transformations and eventually it would spit out a huuuuge single C# document

This is hilarious! It takes a special kind of ignorance to come up with a solution like this.

[1f60c]

It has to be satire because of Tom's complete overreaction and the fact that comments are actually one of the easiest things to handle when building a lexer (usually, you just discard them). Eval'ing them makes no sense.

That said, I suppose stranger things have happened.

[chipdart]

> Is this real? It can't be real. Nobody can be this stupid.

Having worked in an org with an official in-house genius who was terribly tight with a tech-illiterate leadership and faked his way into his status, I can't really tell. Throwing people under the bus, blaming the world around them for problems created by your brittle code, shunning best practices in favor of finger-pointing... This happens in small shops more often than we'd like believe.

As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. Because fiction is expected to make sense.

[_nalply]

It's the inner platform effect. When I was young I fell into the same trap. I invented a flexible database schema where I put each field into a database row with some metadata describing the field. But that's nonsense. Just use what the database provides.

There's a Wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

A variant of it is: Any sufficiently complicated program contains a slow and buggy implementation of half of Lisp. That's the Greenspun's tenth rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

This applies to the kernel as well to put it bluntly and a bit ironically: eBPF, but this shouldn't be understood that I mean that eBPF is not well thought out! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBPF

[Joker_vD]

> flexible database schema where I put each field into a database row with some metadata describing the field.

I imagine everyone has invented this scheme at one point or another. It's so obvious, when you think about it!

[matheusmoreira]

Any sufficiently advanced tagging system turns into dynamic typing for databases.

[bruce511]

I'm _pretty_ sure it's satire, but the fact that you and I can't say for sure is perhaps illustrative of the failure.

I've encountered this pattern several times over my career. Some very smart programmer decides that for "reasons" the standard way to do something is "bad". (Usually "performance" or "bloat" are words bandied around.) They then happily architect a new system to replace the "old thing". Of course the new thing is completely undocumented (because genius programmers don't waste their time writing docs).

If you're _lucky_ the programmer then spends his whole career there maintaining the thing. If you're lucky the whole thing becomes obsolete and discarded before he retires. Hint: You're not lucky.

So what you are left with is this big ball of smoosh, with no documentation, that no-one can figure-out, much less understand. Oh he designed this before multi-core processors were a thing? Before we switched to a preemtive threaded OS? Well no, none of the code is thread-safe, and he's left the company so we need someone to "just update it".

There are reasons standard libraries exist. There are usually reasons they're a bit slower than hand-coding specific cases in assembler. There are reasons why they are "bloated" with support for lots of edge-cases. (like comments).

When some really smart person starts talking about how it's all rubbish, be afraid. Be very afraid.

[sumtechguy]

> There are reasons standard libraries exist

That right there. Before there is a standard lib for something if there are N people coding something up there could be N! ways to do something.

If you do not know about a standard lib or it doesn't exist there will be some wild code written.

It is when that standard library shows up you should at least consider just throwing your bespoke code away. Not always but should at least be considered. I personally have replaced thousands of lines of code and modules I wrote just by switching them to some existing library. The upside is if that standard lib does not do what I want I have enough knowledge to either bend it around so it does or I can fix it up (or put my bespoke code back). I know I am not that smart, but I know enough that my code is probably brittle and probably should be thrown away.

Also watch out for some 'standard libs'. Some of them are little more than someone's hobby project and have all the exact same issues you are trying to avoid. One project I worked on some guy had written a grid control. He was charging something like 10k a year to use it. But it was just one guy and I quote "i just touch it once or twice a year and drink margaritas on the beach". It was a bug prone riddled mess we spent a non insignificant amount of time fixing. We bought another one for a onetime fee of 500 bucks and it was wildly faster and more importantly had near zero bugs and a turn around time of 1-2 days if we found one.