A Quality Programmer

VERSION 0.1?!!

For god’s sake, I can only imagine what the bugs were like… or this is just a mockup done in After Effects (with the pilots pretending to be in sync while the jaeger goes through some pre-programmed stuff) to impress the top brass?

The thread above made me laugh very hard, mostly because I’ve seen many similar things in my own programming experience. (If you want to hear my programming stories, ask me on my personal blog.) Let me add some more:

Sometimes one of the external libraries crashes on perfectly valid input, to the programmers’ consternation. They’d love to use a better library, but first they need to brass to approve the time and funds to find/make one and modify the code to use it. And the brass won’t approve that unless they’re pleased with the demo.

As a temporary measure they put all direct use of that library in its own process so at least it can’t crash the whole program when it goes down. The code is littered with sections like this:

// always use the manager for this library; // it handles the inter-process communication // NEVER load the library in this process; // it crashes erratically nextValue = LibraryManager.getNextValue();log(nextValue);

if (nextValue != -1) {     // works better with -3     complicatedFunction(nextValue - 3); } else { // library crashed     // put backup code here at some point }

During the demo they discover a whole new failure mode for that library -  it suddenly starts producing nonsense values for no apparent reason. This leads to sending a lot of nonsense to the pilots, who aren’t very happy about the sudden distraction but keep going with the demo.

The programmer watching the logs on another screen notices within a few seconds and has to kill the process dealing with that library to make the nonsense stop. The pilots aren’t very happy with the imperfect communication (due to incomplete backup code) either, but it’s better than constant distraction and they both have the planned demo sequence memorized anyway.

As the pilots are heading back to talk to the brass, one of the programmers snags a radio and explains the sudden stream of nonsense to the pilots. They promptly help the programmers get approval to use a better library, but due to the need to rewrite a lot of code the new library isn’t fully integrated until version 0.2.5.

On the other hand, it might not be that bad.

Maybe this isn’t a demo to show other people, it’s just an internal test. (No one should see version 0.1, there are too many bugs in it for that.) The demo that got the first line of Jaegers ordered (in Tales From Year Zero) probably didn’t have much Drift software at all, since Caitlin Lightcap bridged in in the middle of it without even knowing if Drifting was possible.

And they might have used mock data at that point rather than actually hooking pilots up to it. I know I’d be wary of hooking someone up to version 0.1 of a brain-computer interface where the computer can send data, especially since in this case bugs could really hurt.

But sometimes good software development practices don’t get followed…

public class Morning{

    public static void main (String args[]){         int coffee, timeSlept;     Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in);

    coffee = input.nextInt();     timeSlept = input.nextInt();

        if (coffee >= 1 || timeSlept >= 5){

            System.out.println(“wHEEEE!!”);

        }

        else {

            System.out.println(“Shoot me”);