Who here are Programmers

[Hermiod]

Even on the research side, I think I put more effort into code maintainability than some of my associates. I'd like to think I bring a moderating, high-level design influence to what might otherwise be a mess of low-level, hand-optimized C code.

To be honest, I've come across quite a few people who write their code that way because it means that only they can maintain it. Keeps them valuable and employed.

Code should be written in a clean, readable, maintainable style and to an agreed set of standards.

 

[Lindley]

In this case, it's simply a philosophical difference. The guy responsible for much of it is plenty valuable to the company anyway. He really does find the type of code he writes easiest to understand.

And to be fair, it does have a logic to it, and he *does* know a lot more tricks about hand-optimization and numerical stability than I do. It's simply so dense that it's really hard to puzzle out what's actually going on. He doesn't like whitespace as much as I do.

 

[Hermiod]

In this case, it's simply a philosophical difference. The guy responsible for much of it is plenty valuable to the company anyway. He really does find the type of code he writes easiest to understand.

And to be fair, it does have a logic to it, and he *does* know a lot more tricks about hand-optimization and numerical stability than I do. It's simply so dense that it's really hard to puzzle out what's actually going on. He doesn't like whitespace as much as I do.

Unfortunately, from my perspective I would have to think about what happens if there's a problem and he is sick or, worse, he leaves the company.

It also depends on the size of the organisation, I think. If you have thousands of engineers then you need to agree on a common coding standard.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

In this case, it's simply a philosophical difference. The guy responsible for much of it is plenty valuable to the company anyway. He really does find the type of code he writes easiest to understand.

And to be fair, it does have a logic to it, and he *does* know a lot more tricks about hand-optimization and numerical stability than I do. It's simply so dense that it's really hard to puzzle out what's actually going on. He doesn't like whitespace as much as I do.

Unfortunately, from my perspective I would have to think about what happens if there's a problem and he is sick or, worse, he leaves the company.

It also depends on the size of the organisation, I think. If you have thousands of engineers then you need to agree on a common coding standard.

And when a company is very small (like the one I work for), everybody pretty much does their own thing and has their own kingdoms to worry about. There are efforts made to coordinate now, but the code is written in just about every style you can think of, because everybody has their own preferences and there's never been anyone to "lay down the law" on the matter.

 

[Hermiod]

And when a company is very small (like the one I work for), everybody pretty much does their own thing and has their own kingdoms to worry about. There are efforts made to coordinate now, but the code is written in just about every style you can think of, because everybody has their own preferences and there's never been anyone to "lay down the law" on the matter.

Sure, I've worked for a small company with four engineers total too so I know all about that. It was there where I met my first Job Security Through Code Obscurity type too. Not only was his code bizarre and virtually impossible to understand it was also written in a custom variant of C specifically designed for hardware control that only he understood.

 

[John Picard]

I am a code monkey. Mainframe COBOL, DB2, Adabas Natural, and now .Net.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I am a code monkey. Mainframe COBOL, DB2, Adabas Natural, and now .Net.

Which .Net language do you prefer most? C#?

 

[zombieChan51]

I am a code monkey. Mainframe COBOL, DB2, Adabas Natural, and now .Net.

Which .Net language do you prefer most? C#?

I doubt anyone likes VB.NET

 

[John Picard]

I am a code monkey. Mainframe COBOL, DB2, Adabas Natural, and now .Net.

Which .Net language do you prefer most? C#?

I doubt anyone likes VB.NET

I do VB.Net. I have no experience with C#, and quite honestly, I'm bored shitless with programming. I'm ready to move on to something else.

 

[pork3]

Work in the game industry. C++, C#, Assembly (rarely), LUA, Python, Perl....
Depends on what I'm working on, but there's more languages in the mix.

Personally, the most tedious part of the job is dealing with all the fucking platforms and peculiarities of each one. Programming for PS3 SPUs is tedious, the Wii is a dinosaur and so are their development kits, but the most bothersome is developing for Mobile platforms. Despise that part of the job (as it's not what I signed up for, read..boring) and it's something we're increasing focus on in the months to come.

-Jamman

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Work in the game industry. C++, C#, Assembly (rarely), LUA, Python, Perl....
Depends on what I'm working on, but there's more languages in the mix.

Personally, the most tedious part of the job is dealing with all the fucking platforms and peculiarities of each one. Programming for PS3 SPUs is tedious, the Wii is a dinosaur and so are their development kits, but the most bothersome is developing for Mobile platforms. Despise that part of the job (as it's not what I signed up for, read..boring) and it's something we're increasing focus on in the months to come.

-Jamman

What are most mobile games written in these days? I remember when it used to be all JME!

 

[Hermiod]

Work in the game industry. C++, C#, Assembly (rarely), LUA, Python, Perl....
Depends on what I'm working on, but there's more languages in the mix.

Personally, the most tedious part of the job is dealing with all the fucking platforms and peculiarities of each one. Programming for PS3 SPUs is tedious, the Wii is a dinosaur and so are their development kits, but the most bothersome is developing for Mobile platforms. Despise that part of the job (as it's not what I signed up for, read..boring) and it's something we're increasing focus on in the months to come.

-Jamman

What are most mobile games written in these days? I remember when it used to be all JME!

More and more mobile games are written for the native OS instead of using Java these days - so Objective-C for the iPhone, C++ for Symbian etc.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Yup, me is a programmer (primarily for the web now).

Professional: ColdFusion MX, PHP, HTML 4+ w/ CSS, Perl5, TCL, CGI, JavaScript, Apache Velocity Templates, Computer Associates Forest & Trees 6.0 and CleverPath Portal 4.7, PeopleSoft 8.4, Java 1.2, Visual Basic 6, Macromedia Director MX Lingo/Flash MX ActionScript, NeXTStep Objective C, Microsoft and ANSII C, OS/2 Presentation Manager, Pascal

Educational/Hobby from "back in the day": Atari Basic XL, Common LISP (God help me with that one!)

This, BTW, is why I fail miserably in technical interviews. I have so many languages rolling around in my head, many of them quite similar, that I can't write a line of code without wondering "is it base-0 or base-1?" or "does this one use semi-colons?" I usually resort to some cobbled-together amalgamation of pseudo-code to get my point across, and it never really impresses anyone.

 

[John Picard]

Yup, me is a programmer (primarily for the web now).

Professional: ColdFusion MX, PHP, HTML 4+ w/ CSS, Perl5, TCL, CGI, JavaScript, Apache Velocity Templates, Computer Associates Forest & Trees 6.0 and CleverPath Portal 4.7, PeopleSoft 8.4, Java 1.2, Visual Basic 6, Macromedia Director MX Lingo/Flash MX ActionScript, NeXTStep Objective C, Microsoft and ANSII C, OS/2 Presentation Manager, Pascal

Educational/Hobby from "back in the day": Atari Basic XL, Common LISP (God help me with that one!)

This, BTW, is why I fail miserably in technical interviews. I have so many languages rolling around in my head, many of them quite similar, that I can't write a line of code without wondering "is it base-0 or base-1?" or "does this one use semi-colons?" I usually resort to some cobbled-together amalgamation of pseudo-code to get my point across, and it never really impresses anyone.

Been through that before, and it's the fault of the interviewer. If a person can code, then platform and flavor should be irrelevant.

I had an interview with Dollar-Thrifty many years ago, and the interviewer was asking me COBOL questions that were related to batch processing -- the problem is that my COBOL experience was CICS online.

He didn't think I had enough experience based on some of my answers, not to mention their platform was a DEC while I'd written some batch on a 370-series

 

[Lindley]

Been through that before, and it's the fault of the interviewer. If a person can code, then platform and flavor should be irrelevant.

Yes and no. To a certain extent what's important is algorithms, and the actual implementation in a given language will be similar.

But some languages have some styles that suit them better than others. For instance, you can instantly tell a Java programmer trying to write C++ by their over-use of "new" (HOPEFULLY matched by deletes....but even so), or a C programmer trying to write C++ by their tendency to write "C with classes" rather than fully leveraging generic programming with STL and Boost.

So is generalizing your language experience a good idea? Probably. But you should also learn how to really push a few languages to their limits, to make yourself stand out.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

When I interviewed for this job, I had some of the programmers give me crap because they didn't like my style of MUMPS coding. They happen to be big fans of crazy one-liners, and I was perfectly fine breaking my code up into a nice flow with dotted-do statements.

God forbid code be readable in this day and age.

 

[pork3]

Work in the game industry. C++, C#, Assembly (rarely), LUA, Python, Perl....
Depends on what I'm working on, but there's more languages in the mix.

Personally, the most tedious part of the job is dealing with all the fucking platforms and peculiarities of each one. Programming for PS3 SPUs is tedious, the Wii is a dinosaur and so are their development kits, but the most bothersome is developing for Mobile platforms. Despise that part of the job (as it's not what I signed up for, read..boring) and it's something we're increasing focus on in the months to come.

-Jamman

What are most mobile games written in these days? I remember when it used to be all JME!

More and more mobile games are written for the native OS instead of using Java these days - so Objective-C for the iPhone, C++ for Symbian etc.

I'll avoid getting into details, but it's primarily C++ at the moment for the iPhone (not huge fans of Objective-C).
We have a build framework and automated test harness used in our porting of relevant core technologies (that work on everything from Unix/Mac/ps3/wii/xenon/pc).
We're getting there...

Cheers.

-Jamman

 

[drasche]

This thread just made me realize I've been coding for a little more than 25 years, I'm 37. I began on Atari 800 XL too with BASIC

Professionally, my career revolved around Visual Basic 5 then 6, and still do. Now I also do ASP classic, HTML, CSS and Javascript. I also do SQL Server 2000. I also do technical design and production support as part of my job. And the worst part: I enjoy it

As a hobby, I did a few things in PHP and MySQL, and now trying to move on to things like C#, SQL Server and PostgreSQL.