What turds have you been asked to polish?

[EternalOptimist]

Well, here's the thing - I don't think I've ever had a job where there wasn't a turd to polish.

Oh, how I dream of somebody saying "Hey Zip, our co is doing really, really well and we're so organised and on top of things. Why don't we give you a few hundred quid a day so you can bugger about with whatever you fancy?"

If there were no feck-ups, we wouldn't be making any money.

Its a fair point. I get my money from fixing the occasional screw up that no one else has a clue about.

[EternalOptimist]

I don't think that's true at all. If you've always had a turd to polish in each of your jobs to date, does that mean you've never done any new builds? Never been asked to augment a system that's basically sound with some new functionality, or to re-implement a proven but aging design in a newer technology?

You'll know when you're dealing with a true turd. It'll be a turd before you arrive, it'll be a turd long after you're finished or you decide to decline the work, and it'll be a turd until the day they put it in the bin and start over again. And at all points on that timeline someone with influence (usually its amateur author) will believe it to be the best thing since sliced bread despite all available evidence to the contrary.

bollocks

[Gentile]

bollocks

Which particular parts were "bollocks" and why, EO?

Or were you just exercising your Tourette muscle?

[EternalOptimist]

Which particular parts were "bollocks" and why, EO?

Or were you just exercising your Tourette muscle?

oh deary deary me.
you seem to imply that just because a job is green fields , it cannot be a disaster waiting to happen. have you never seen changing requirements, bad spec, moving goal posts , project creep.
????

a sound sytem that has a new angle. cant possibly go wrong ???


well I may have been unlucky and had the same bad experiences as zippy.
but very few project run on rails in my experience

[Zippy]

I guess I've never been a bum on seat contractor, really. What's it like?

[EternalOptimist]

I guess I've never been a bum on seat contractor, really. What's it like?

well i dont know dear.

but anyone who denigrates another by using the term 'enforced referential integrity'
is a gobsh!te in my humble opinion

[Gentile]

oh deary deary me.
you seem to imply that just because a job is green fields , it cannot be a disaster waiting to happen. have you never seen changing requirements, bad spec, moving goal posts , project creep.
????

a sound sytem that has a new angle. cant possibly go wrong ???


well I may have been unlucky and had the same bad experiences as zippy.
but very few project run on rails in my experience

No, not at all. What I am saying is that a "disaster waiting to happen" is materially different from being asked to polish a turd. The distinctive characteristics of the latter being that you have an existing awful product that the client is nonetheless convinced is 99% complete and wants to keep, when in reality it would take you longer to make it work as intended than it would to build something from scratch.

[Gentile]

well i dont know dear.

but anyone who denigrates another by using the term 'enforced referential integrity'
is a gobsh!te in my humble opinion

I think I made it clear that the real WTF was the person's insistence on using hundreds of near-identically named tables in preference to any sort of coherent design, EO, not just that they'd missed a few steps in normalisation. However, I can see you're upset this evening for some inexplicable reason, so I'll leave it there. It's a shame, because you seem like a pretty decent guy most of the time. It's just occasionally that you have these outbursts like the one above, seemingly without provocation and at random, that honestly leave me mystified as to what's upset you. :shruggy shoulders smiley needed:

[Gentile]

I guess I've never been a bum on seat contractor, really. What's it like?

If I ever find out what one is I'll let you know.

[NickFitz]

Back in the Eighties I was doing the Amiga conversion of Night Hunter:

One of the things that had to happen at the start of each level was that those five keys you see at the bottom right had to be distributed in a randomly-chosen subset of possible locations around the level. Of course, you couldn't put a key inside the room it opened, as then you couldn't get to it; and you couldn't have the key for room A in room B and for room B in room A, as then you couldn't get either, and so on. So, when distributing the keys around the level, the code had to check the graph of doors and previously-allocated keys to ensure that didn't happen; and that called for a nice recursive bit of code that could backtrack and try again until all the constraints were satisfied.

Now, the original game was written for the Atari ST, which like the Amiga had a 68000 processor, so you might think I could just use the original code; after all, nothing about that algorithm would change. As it happened, the creator of the original thought he'd been extremely clever and was frightened of giving away his secrets, and had thus refused to provide all of his source code to me (despite Ubisoft's attempts to persuade him). However I did have the bit which did the level initialisation, so I worked out which bit of code I needed to look at, printed it out, and sat down to work through it and make sure I understood it and could do the minor changes to make it work with my data structures.

Reading 68000 assembly language isn't particularly hard, but one problem was that the original creator was French. So all variables and labels were written in French; but more than that, they were in greatly-abbreviated French, and involved bits of French programmer slang. Think in terms of a label like "initialise-key-buffer" being translated into French, with slang words for "key" and "buffer", and then most of the vowels removed, along with other arbitrarily-selected letters: something like "inkbf", but in French.

Then there was the fact that, frankly, the chap's opinion of his own abilities was perhaps a little unjustified, judging by that code. It was spaghetti of a level I'd seldom seen before, and I was experienced at reading 6502 Commodore 64 code written by 15-year-olds. It ran to about twelve printed sides of A4; it recursed in multiple places; but better still, different places recursed back to multiple recursion-entry-points. It would decide something unintelligible was the case, and leap back six pages, where some other condition would be tested, whereupon it might jump forward a page or two, or go back a bit further, and I spent an entire day poring over it and drawing lines backwards and forwards and identifying bits of code that seemed to form some kind of functional unit, but no, this bit up here branches right into the middle of that, and…

And it was half past seven in the evening, and I'd had enough. I threw the printout in the bin, and picked up my notebook, and went to the pub and got a pint of Burton. Then I sat in a quiet corner and set to work. An hour later, halfway through my second pint, I'd got about a dozen pages of notes, and about thirty lines of code written, comprising two functions. I typed it in the next morning, and it worked straight off the bat.

I never again looked at any of the source code for Night Hunter ST in completing Night Hunter Amiga