You’re describing classic ASP except that was usually 17 different versions of the same-named file.

No pun intended

None taken.

I think fucking Access is still around.

I started coding with Visual Basic 3 which basically only had arrays for holding multiple items, so probably 50% of my time was spent writing code to delete items - you had to iterate through the remainder of the array copying values from x to x - 1 and then re-dimensioning the array. I remember having my mind blown when proper collections were introduced with VB4.

Does that mean self-documenting code is actually masturbation?

I pity the fool!

Classic ASP for the win …

oftn th lang ony allwd shrt var nms

I started coding with TurboBasic which allowed variable names of any length but the compiler only looked at the first two letters (and case-insensitive at that), so DOUGHNUT_COUNT and DoobieCounter were actually the same variable. Good times debugging that kind of shit.

I don’t know exactly. There’s some process you go through with the IRS to find out what you were paid and how much was withheld in situations like this where the company just goes out of existence suddenly. The IRS has all that info anyway because companies withhold and submit the taxes (at least while they still exist).

A former coworker of mine once learned that his company was shutting down because the office was raided by FBI agents who seized all the computers, servers and company documents. Everybody sat around in the empty office for a little while and then went home, and nobody ever got paid or heard from the company ever again. Even the tax documents at the end of the year didn’t get sent out.

When there are more people shouting directions than people actually coding you’ve got too many cooks.

Ha ha what about when the shouters:coders ratio hits 10:1?

Reminds me of the joke about the old bull and the young bull. Young bull says to the old bull “hey pops, let’s run down into the valley and fuck one of those cows”. Old bull says “I’ve got a better idea: let’s walk down and fuck them all.”

This is my favorite Notepad memory: in the late '90s I went through a six-month stretch where Internet Explorer’s “View Source” command just totally stopped working. It would normally open up the HTML source of a page in Notepad and suddenly not having this made debugging … challenging to say the least. Nobody else that I worked with had this problem and nobody could figure out what had happened to me.

The culprit turned out to be an inexplicable IE bug where View Source wouldn’t work if you had a shortcut named “Notepad” on your desktop. It didn’t even have to be a shortcut to Notepad, it just had to be named that. The fix was to just rename the shortcut “NotepadX” and then View Source worked again.

I used to enjoy building webpages with Notepad.

Also make it yesterday.

I found a solution: I quit coding and became a school bus driver.

then you probably spend ten times longer writing and re-writing tests

This is always what I’ve seen personally when people use TDD. And it’s worse because the inevitable time crunch towards the end of the project means the developers stop maintaining the tests, which renders all of the work put into the tests up to that point useless.

I had a coworker who was big into TDD. He was using it on a disaster project that was way over budget and long overdue. I was sitting in on a meeting between him and the client when he tried to defend the project’s status by saying “you don’t understand - we’ve written six times as much test code as actual code!” The client almost punched him.

IMO it doesn’t matter what methodology you use if a) you don’t have the ability to understand what the client actually needs, and 2) you can’t code your way out of a paper bag (or to put it more technically, if you over-architect your solution and then can’t solve all the self-inflicted problems you run into).