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I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.
Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.
I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.
This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.
One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.
Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation
There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.
Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.
6 -
Debugging a request that got lost in a myriad of containers of a scaled application....
It wouldn't be worth a rant if there wasn't some kinky SM stuff in it, wouldn't it?
Regexes. The fucker who wrote a lot of the NGINX (🤢) configuration decided to use the Perl Regexes with named group matching. A lot.
So now I have to fight wild variables supposedly coming from nowhere (as they stem from the named groups)… fucking single location redirects instead of maps.... A d have to write an explanatory documentation while going down the rabbit hole of trying to find out where the fuck that shitty frigging bastard redirected wrong.
I really wish I could eradicate the person who wrote this shit.... -
How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.
But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.
And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.
I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!
But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.5 -
Wrote a perl script to spam group sms to my friends, in perl. Also - web scrapers.
Ugly AF stuff. never heard of strict, or warn when I did it.....
really fun times! -
Almost finished with latest preprocessor.
Why am I always working on preprocessors tho? Shit...
Anyway, almost finished ok.
Idea is, basically, that inside a C source or header you can write a perl subroutine instead of `#define ...`.
The mechanism is rather simple:
```C (wat?)
macro mymacro($expr) {
· // perl code goes here
· return "$expr;"
};
```
`$expr` is just a string holding whatever block of code comes after an invocation of `mymacro`. You can use the builtins `tokenshift` and `tokenpop` on a string to get the first and last token, respectively, and then `tokensplit` gives you *all* the tokens.
Whatever string you return is what the expression you received is replaced by:
- You can just give back the expression as-is to get the exact same thing you wrote -- so `mymacro char* wat;` gives you `char* wat;`.
- But if you return a galaxy's worth of C code, then bam. Macro expanded into it, just like that. It's a perl subroutine, so let your imagination fly. Wanna run some scripts at (pre)compile time? Then you can.
- If you return an empty string, then puff. No code. Input consumed.
- If you give the name of another macro (eg "another_macro $expr;"), the expansion recurses.
- If you return the name of the currently executing macro, no recursion happens. This lets you wrap C keywords without (too much) fear.
It's kind of cool because a separate perl module is built from the macros themselves. So then you can include those in another C file. Syntax is basically more perl because why not:
```C (yes)
package mypkg;
· use lib "path/to/myshit/";
· use pm funk qw(mymacro);
```
The `lib` bit actually translates to `-I(path)` for gcc. But for some reason the way you add an include path in perl is `use lib "path"`, so yep. I get it's confusing but just go with the ::~ f l o w ~:: ok.
Then the `pm` stuff is not valid perl (i think), but I took the easy way out and invented it to ensure there is a way to say "OK I don't give a single shit about the C stuff, just give me these qw()'d funky macros from this file." If you simply `use funk qw(mymacro)` then you also get an `#include "funk.h"`.
Speaking of which, headers are automatically generated. Yeah, fuck you, I added `public` to C, bite me. It's actually quite sexy as I defined it using the preprocessor:
```C (yes but actually perl)
macro public($expr) {
· my $dst=cmamout()->{export};\
· tokentidy $expr;
· push @$dst,$expr;
· return "$expr;";
};
```
Where `cmamout()` is a hash from which the output is generated. Oh, and `tokentidy` is just a random builtin that cleans up extra whitespace, don't mind it.
So now the bad stuff: I have to fix a few things. For instance, notice how I had to escape a new line there? Yeah. It's called dumb fix to shit parsing, of course.
But overall I'm quite satisfied with this. And the reason why may not be so obvious so I'ma spill it out: backticks, motherfucker.
That's right. Have a source emitter written in an esoteric language?
```C (yes really but not really)
macro bashit($expr) {
· my ($exe,@args)=tokensplit $expr;
· return `$exe @args`;
};
```
So now you can fork off into parallel dimensions; what can I say pass the pipe brother.
MAMmoth in the room is yes, this depends on MAM. What is MAM? MAMMI. It's the original name of my infamous picture of an ouroboros eating it's own ass while stuck in limbo contemplating terrible life decisions of a build tool, avtomat (go ARSLASH <AR/> [habibi]).
So what's the deal with that? avtomat is a good build tool _for me_, not... ugh, you. I made it for *myself* baby things are not going to work out between us I'm sorry. MAM just does lots of things I wanted build tools to do in the __EXACT__ way I wanted them done. I'd say you should go use it too maybe, but actually don't and you shouldn't because I broke main some weeks ago to fix some other shit and then implement this. Yeah, pretty stupid, but what the hell. I'm the only user after all!
In conclusion, I am fully expecting to receive my mad props and street cred in the mail along with your marriage proposals en masse, effective immediately.
Further reading: https://youtube.com/watch/...5 -
I know a lot of people aren't fans of Microsoft here, but does anyone have some extended experience with using powershell?
I've been using it for creating a script that handles quite a large set of tasks for setting up and configuring some application servers and so far I have been really digging the language. Being able to invoke the script against remote hosts in parallel like ansible has been a really cool learning experience.
Admittedly it's verbose as fuck, so getting the same thing done in something like python/perl might be like half the lines of code. And I know that some of the commands illicit a "WTF?" every now and again. But I think one of the powershell tutorials I watched early on in attempting this helped make using powershell not suck ass.
Every command is basically 'verb-noun'. You don't know what the command or switches are:
> get-help "command" -showwindow
It will give you a list of options if you didn't select the exact command with get-help.
It feels* amazingly buttoned up as a scripting language and it's really cool to be able to take advantage of lower level stuff, like you can run alternative shells (we have cygwin installed on some of our servers), you can run C# code, you have access to interfacing with .NET api's. I haven't messed with anything azure yet, but being able to interface with products and services like SQL/Exchange/O365/azure/servers/desktops from the same language seems pretty cool.
Admittedly, the learning curve feels terrible though. I felt like a dunce for the first couple weeks, couldn't navigate the language at all, and was always in the docs trying to figure stuff out. I think I just needed to understand how the people developing powershell intended for it to be used. Once I was able to put two-and-two together about the verb-noun structure and how to find information/examples about the cmdlets it's been quite easy to work with it.
If anyone else has any extended experience with it, please share your thoughts/opinions. Curious to see if your experiences are/were similar to mine.
If you don't have Powershell experience, please feel free to share your opinions of Micro$haft and me for using Micro$haft products too! It's all good 😎9
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