• There's a level of Hell reserved for people who consider creating temporary files and directories with formats like tempdir-{month}{day}.
• There's a level of Hell reserved for people who write batch processing code that doesn't clean up after itself.
• There's a level of Hell reserved for global and environment variables and those people who use them without care or regard in production code.
• There's a level of Hell reserved for those people who write uncommented and unstructured code.
• There's a level of Hell reserved for that person who did all of the above in some production code which caused me a headache in debugging today.
• There's a level of Hell reserved for those people who don't understand what's involved in production code but demand for it to be "just fixed so it works".
• There's a level of Hell reserved for people who use bless $self, ref($proto) || $proto
• There's a level of Hell reserved for people who write "object-orientated" modules that break inheritance.
• There's a level of Hell reserved for the person who incorporated the concept of "ASCII" and "binary" files into the FTP protocol and the Windows operating system - Come'on, it's all just bits, ones and zeros, people!
• There's a level of Hell reserved for the person who incorporated the \r\n line feed on Windows platforms - Yes, I know there was a valid historical motivation in doing it this way, but I'm venting!

I am feeling vented ... :-)

perl -le 'print+unpack("N",pack("B32","00000000000000000000001000110110"))'

There's a level of Hell reserved for the person who incorporated the concept of "ASCII" and "binary" files into the FTP protocol and the Windows operating system - Come'on, it's all just bits, ones and zeros, people!

Hope you never have to work with VMS. Or pretty much anything besides Unix, actually. But there may very well be a level of hell reserved for people who create filesystems that have multiple separate ways to store data associated with a file, dub one of them the "data fork", and then proceed to store data in the others.

There's a level of Hell reserved for the person who incorporated the \r\n line feed on Windows platforms

No, that's standard-compliant behavior. There's a level of hell reserved, I'm quite sure, for people who decide to save one byte per line by ignoring bits and pieces of well-established standards such as ASCII. (Not that the folks at MS aren't guilty of things like that too, but we can't take the time to list those infractions here, and they aren't Perl-related anyway.) A Windows file you can just send straight out a socket, but a Unix-style file has to be munged to adhere to all the protocols when you send it over the network. (That's not why MS followed the standard, though; they didn't care at the time about networks; they just wanted to be able to toss a file at the parallel port and have the printer "just work" with no driver. Remember ASCII printers? Yeah. I even had one that did Extended ASCII. The output was barely legible, but hey, it worked.)

---

for(unpack("C*",'GGGG?GGGG?O__\?WccW?{GCw?Wcc{?Wcc~?Wcc{?~cc'
.'W?')){$j=$_-63;++$a;for$p(0..7){$h[$p][$a]=$j%2;$j/=2}}for$
p(0..7){for$a(1..45){$_=($h[$p-1][$a])?'#':' ';print}print$/}
[download]

There's a level of Hell reserved for the person who incorporated the concept of "ASCII" and "binary" files into the FTP protocol and the Windows operating system - Come'on, it's all just bits, ones and zeros, people!

I personally like ftp to translate line endings to the local notion. Saves a headache trying to convert them manually...^M anyone?

thor

Well, that would just lead to the person who designed an os that distinguished between the two....

• There's a level in Hell reserved for pointy headedhaired bosses who ignore good functional solutions simply because they are free and instead impose expensive, complex and unreliable 'out of the botbox' products.
• There's a level in Hell reserved for people who send spam.

Update: it must have been late when I typed that :-)

But I liked the 'out of the bot' products...

Hmmm I wonder what Freud would have to say about that.

NOTE: Read with caution and flame-proof outfit. :)

There is a level of Hell reserved for...

• ... people who confuse the usefulness of a language with whether they personally like it (this especially seems to be true when it comes to python zealots, although certainly the vast majority of python programmers are a very nice bunch).
• ... people who sneer at perl because it is "just a scripting language" instead of a "real" programming language.
• ... people who claim that any perl program that is bigger than what fits on one 80x24 screen is inherently unreadable.
• ... the decision to not include a proper switch statement in perl. foreach etc. may work, but it looks like an ugly kludge to me (or at least ugly).
• ... people who use variable and function names such as $a, @b, %c and &d and the like.
• ... people who use variable and function names such as $a, @b, %c and &d and the like and expect you to maintain their code later on (or leave the job/project/whatever for other opportunities so you don't even have a choice).
• ... people who think that OO is always the One and Only way to go (after all, that's what OO means, right?).
• ... vi.
• ... software patents, the people who grant them and the people who apply for them (and a very special level this is indeed!)
• ... people who have no sense of humour.
• ... people who think that orthogonality in a language is a good thing.
• ... people who limit what you can do in a language so they can build compilers more easily.
• ... people who advocate the use of modula, pascal, oberon or other such languages. :)
• ... people who consider certain programming techniques (like goto, but it surely is not limited to that) to be harmful as such, instead of being able to see them for what they really are - another tool that you can choose to use or not use, and which is not inherently good or bad on its own.
• ... people who think that code is not free speech and should not be protected as such (might be better to not send some of these people to hell at all, though, lest they'll be offered jobs down there).
• ... people who don't test their code before checking in.
• ... people who insist perl is never the right tool.
• ... people who insist !perl is never the right tool.
• ... people who program their user interfaces with Tk.
• ... random acts of management.
• ... people who don't know what subroutines are for.
• ... people who keep re-inventing the wheel instead of focusing on the actual work that needs to be done.
• ... people who keep re-inventing the wheel and keep getting it wrong.
• ... people who insist that you need to refactor existing, working and less-than-completely-ugly code instead of writing those important missing bits, just because, well, you have to refactor your code after all, don't you? it's just hip and shows how great a programmer you are!
• ... probably many others I haven't thought of, but this is enough steam-blowing for today, I guess. :)

--
mowgli

... people who insist that you need to refactor existing, working and less-than-completely-ugly code instead of writing those important missing bits, just because, well, you have to refactor your code after all, don't you? it's just hip and shows how great a programmer you are!

Done properly, supported with unit tests, as part of a disciplined schedule of writing simple, test-driven code, it's only the best way I know of to produce code that can be changed as easily as possible in the future.

Amen. I always think about it as pre-emptive maintainance.

Of course, if you only have one day to implement feature X you implement feature X rather than refactor existing code.

However, the fact that you only have one day indicates larger project scheduling problems - exactly the sort of problems that unit tests, test-driven code and continual refactoring can help with.

"Done properly" is the key point here. ;) If that's the case, I do agree with you, too, but there are also people who simply rewrite their existing code just for the sake of doing so, transforming it from one state to another one that's different but not really more easily maintainable, easier to understand or showing any other quality that would justify the time they invested in doing it. And there are also bosses with at least somewhat pointy hair that use micromanagement to make *you* do that, even if they are otherwise quite reasonable to deal with. :)

--
mowgli

Excellent formatting! I was getting very tired of reading "There's a level in hell reserved for.." before every point in the preceeding posts. I recommend everyone adopt this format or at least something along the lines of TALIHRF.. (which is FRHILAT spelled backwards! Wait, that doesn't mean anything... ). Anyways commenting on formatting isn't enough substantial content for a post, so I'll proceed to off my insights on your (as of yet unread) points:

people who confuse the usefulness of a language with whether they personally like it

I concur. To expand on this slightly I should mention this especially applies to highly specialized languages and those in a different paradigm than the programmer is used to. For example, someone who has only programmed in c, java, and perl may think prolog is entirely useless while someone extensively involved in AI programming may think it's the best thing since beer with skittles. Moral of the story: you haven't programmed everything yet (if you have, I have a job for you), so you don't know how useful a given language could be. Oh, and 5 points off for referring to python programmers as zealots (python rocks!).

people who sneer at perl because it is "just a scripting language" instead of a "real" programming language.

Ah, the age old question of Do scripters suffer discrimination? (it's a slashdot link, don't bother). Well, sadly scripters will always be second to us real programmers. Disregard all you here about "programming is programming" the only people who say that are TCL programmers anyways. Real programmers use real languages, like Python and Perl ;-).

the decision to not include a proper switch statement in perl. foreach etc. may work, but it looks like an ugly kludge to me (or at least ugly).

I group switch in with goto as ugly, unmaintainable, brute methods of programming. Perl's a very high level language, use it like one!

vi

And emacs, yuck, talk about being left in the 70s. Use kate, take back the mouse!

software patents, the people who grant them and the people who apply for them

Do not blame those who apply for them, they can't pass up the opportunity when there competitors have it as well. The problem lies with those agencies that grant the patents out of ignorance.

people who insist perl is never the right tool.

I disagree.

people who insist !perl is never the right tool.

I disagree ;-).

Okay, now I'm just getting silly. Nice post and goodnight :).

people who confuse the usefulness of a language with whether they personally like it.

I concur. To expand on this slightly I should mention this especially applies to highly specialized languages and those in a different paradigm than the programmer is used to. For example, someone who has only programmed in c, java, and perl may think prolog is entirely useless while someone extensively involved in AI programming may think it's the best thing since beer with skittles. Moral of the story: you haven't programmed everything yet (if you have, I have a job for you), so you don't know how useful a given language could be. Oh, and 5 points off for referring to python programmers as zealots (python rocks!).

I'm sure it does - I haven't tried it myself yet, mostly because I'm not fond of the idea that the amount of indentation of a line defining semantics rather than just reflecting them, but I don't really know much about Python at all, so I can't speak on it.

Neither do I want to, btw; I think there is nothing wrong with Python, Python programmers, Python developers or whatever. In fact, the whole zealotry thing is of course not limited to Python at all, but since my personal experiences in this regard have mostly been with Python programmers (who also disliked Perl a lot, to say the least), I mentioned those.

Sorry if I stepped on anyone's toes - I wrote "python zealots" to distinguish them from "python programmers", not to imply that the latter were necessarily the former. :)

Apart from that, I agree that there a lot of cool languages for all sorts of jobs; Prolog is one of them, of course, and Erlang also comes to my mind right now. I think that Perl is usually either a good tool for a given job or can be turned into one relatively easily, but it is not *always* the best tool, and using Perl for everything just because it is Perl would be zealotry as well, I guess. :) Everything has its own linguistical niche (even Malbolge).

Oh, and as far as having programmed in every language is concerned - I guess that's impossible. In one of my introductory courses to computer science (longer ago than I would like to think - goodness, I'm feeling old), the professor mentioned a compilation of known programming languages from 1972 (!) that listed more than 700 of them. I guess a lot of these aren't around anymore today, but I also think that a lot more have been invented, so not even a Leonardo da Vinci would be able to learn them all. ;)

... people who sneer at perl because it is "just a scripting language" instead of a "real" programming language.

Ah, the age old question of Do scripters suffer discrimination? (it's a slashdot link, don't bother). Well, sadly scripters will always be second to us real programmers. Disregard all you here about "programming is programming" the only people who say that are TCL programmers anyways. Real programmers use real languages, like Python and Perl ;-).

TCL - that's another one I have never really looked into (but which I don't feel the need to look into, either). :) On a serious note, the people who I mostly heard this from where the same who thought that languages should be as simple and limited as possible (so the compilers would be less difficult to build) and that functional programming languages were automatically, inherently superior to imperative languages. Now, I do think that functional programming is a cool thing myself, and a very interesting approach, but things like this always leave a bad taste in my mouth - it's basically just slapping labels on things and then arguing on what's better based on what the labels say, rather than based on the inherent qualities and merits of the things themselves. The same happens with regard to computers etc. in general, too (linux vs. *bsd, for example, solaris vs. linux, sparc vs. x86 and all that), and in fact, it's not even limited to computer science-related topics, but I think going further into that would be completely off-topic now. :)

... the decision to not include a proper switch statement in perl. foreach etc. may work, but it looks like an ugly kludge to me (or at least ugly).

I group switch in with goto as ugly, unmaintainable, brute methods of programming. Perl's a very high level language, use it like one!

TMTOWTDI. :) Anyhow, why do you think switch (or goto, for that matter) is a low-level language concept?

... vi.

And emacs, yuck, talk about being left in the 70s. Use kate, take back the mouse!

I personally found joe to be best-suited for my needs - if you ever tried running X applications (KDE or otherwise) over a dial-up line, you'll know why I prefur the console for now. ;)

... software patents, the people who grant them and the people who apply for them

Do not blame those who apply for them, they can't pass up the opportunity when there competitors have it as well. The problem lies with those agencies that grant the patents out of ignorance.

Indeed. But still, even applying for software patents as a purely defensive measure is a dangerous thing at best, not to mention that it shows how fouled-up the situation is, anyway (defensive measures were not exactly the initial idea behind patents, after all). I don't blame companies like Red Hat for getting patents on certain things that came from their labs, but I don't think this is the right way to go, either. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi (not literally quoted), "there is no way to peace - peace is the way", and I think that holds true about software patents as well. The best way to go would be to abolish them altogether; otherwise, if things continue like this, we might end up having to sign NDAs just to attend basic math lectures at universities in 50 years simply because the theorems and results presented are covered by patents and copyrighted all over.

Cynical? I wish it'd be. :)

Okay, now I'm just getting silly. Nice post and goodnight :).

Thanks! The same to you. :)

--
mowgli

... vi.

Yeah, what's up with that.. I use Vim and it's so much better. ducks *g*

Makeshifts last the longest.

Yeah, what's up with that.. I use Vim and it's so much better. ducks *g*

Better, but with vim you have still not attained perfection. You must advance further, to Viper. Or you could advance to vilevigor, but then you have to train toward eventually becomming an evil genius so that you can try to take over the world (which never seems to work out, for some reason). With Viper you can train toward eventually becomming a module writer so that you can have your text editor make you coffee (or tea if you prefer) and refactor your code for you while you read usenet in another process.

Update: Corrected thinko. Although vile is, I suppose, a third option.

---

for(unpack("C*",'GGGG?GGGG?O__\?WccW?{GCw?Wcc{?Wcc~?Wcc{?~cc'
.'W?')){$j=$_-63;++$a;for$p(0..7){$h[$p][$a]=$j%2;$j/=2}}for$
p(0..7){for$a(1..45){$_=($h[$p-1][$a])?'#':' ';print}print$/}
[download]

I use Vim and it's so much better. ducks *g*

Whatever works best for you. ;)

--
mowgli

people who use variable and function names such as $a, @b, %c and &d and the like.

Those are okay if they're lexically scoped in a block that fits on half of the screen all at once. (Otherwise, you're spot on, of course.) I say half of the screen, of course, so that you can look at two pieces of code at once (e.g., to view a routine and where it is called).

vi

No. I don't use vi, but it at least has some basic functionality. It's not scriptable, so it's not good for really serious use, but it can get simple jobs done in a pinch, unlike most other so-called text editors (EDIT, Notepad, SimpleText, TPU, ...).

There is however, on a related note, a special judgement reserved for people who release operating systems that don't include basic things like a decent text editor, perl, basic network utils (ping, traceroute, wget), and a compiler. (You're probably okay if it's on the CD but not installed by default; it's not including it at all that gets you the extra bonus warmth.)

---

for(unpack("C*",'GGGG?GGGG?O__\?WccW?{GCw?Wcc{?Wcc~?Wcc{?~cc'
.'W?')){$j=$_-63;++$a;for$p(0..7){$h[$p][$a]=$j%2;$j/=2}}for$
p(0..7){for$a(1..45){$_=($h[$p-1][$a])?'#':' ';print}print$/}
[download]

No. I don't use vi, but it at least has some basic functionality. It's not scriptable, so it's not good for really serious use, but it can get simple jobs done in a pinch, unlike most other so-called text editors (EDIT, Notepad, SimpleText, TPU, ...).

i assure you, not only is vi scriptable, it's really good for serious use. and if you use a buff version like vim you can even have a Perl interpreter inside your editor.

i remeber converting a shell script to Perl once while someone was watching.

# foo.sh

HELLO = "hello"
WORLD = "world"
# tons more of these
[download]

luckily :g/^[A-Z]\+ =/s/^/my $/|s/$/;/ can Perlify all of those variable declarations for me!

# foo.sh

my $HELLO = "hello";
my $WORLD = "world";
# ...
[download]

there's nothing like watching a file morph from one language to another almost magicly.

... people who use variable and function names such as $a, @b, %c and &d and the like.

Those are okay if they're lexically scoped in a block that fits on half of the screen all at once. (Otherwise, you're spot on, of course.) I say half of the screen, of course, so that you can look at two pieces of code at once (.e.g, to view a routine and where it is called).

Granted. I also don't mind variable names like $a if they're used solely as one-time temporary values and the like, but that's about it.

... vi.

No. I don't use vi, but it at least has some basic functionality. It's not scriptable, so it's not good for really serious use, but it can get simple jobs done in a pinch, unlike most other so-called text editors (EDIT, Notepad, SimpleText, TPU, ...).

I'm not convinced. I'd rather use just cat and sed to edit my programs than dabbling with vi. ;) But that's just me, of course.

There is however, on a related note, a special judgement reserved for people who release operating systems that don't include basic things like a decent text editor, perl, network utils (ping, traceroute, wget), and a compiler. (You're probably okay if it's on the CD but not installed by default; it's not including it at all that gets you the extra bonus warmth.)

Absolutely agreed - in particular, not including a C compiler is something that I hope the respective responsible parties get some heat for. ;)

--
mowgli

There is a special place in hell for:

• Marketeers who:
  • believe showing me the same advert for the 1000th time is more likely to make me buy the product than it was the previous 999 times.
  • construct revenue systems based on the above assumption.
  • spammers that buy into it.
• Pointy haired bosses who
  • set deadlines on the basis of a free slot in their, or their bosses schedule.
  • rename and reorganise teams, departments and other organisational structures just so that everyone knows there is a new broom in town, or so that they can be seen to be proactive.
  • force me to write redundant, non-optimal, pedestrian code because whilst recognising that maintainace is important, they refuse to allocate sufficient budget to it, so that they can employ (or train) reasonable quality maintainance programmers.
  • delegate responsibility without the authority to go with it.
• Programmers/designers that beleive
  • their code is the only code that will be running on my box.
  • when their code is running, I will need to give it my full and undivided attention. This includes, but is not limited to:
    • System modal splash screens.
    • System modal dialogs--actually, application modal dialogs are just as bad in 99% of cases.
    • Programs that grab my focus when it feels like it.
    • Programs that raise their own priority to the exclusion of everything else.
    • Programs re-define standard keys to non-standard usage without very good reasons.
  • substituting bloat for design in the name of expedience and relying on Moore's Law to cover it up is ok.
  • coding is simply the assemblage of a collection of off-the-shelf parts.
  • try to protect their jobs and interests by storing my data in a proprietory format and either refusing to publish the specifications of that format, or threaten legal action against anyone who dares to use what ever specification they do publish.
• Users that
  • want the code for free, want a guarentee, expect 24/7 support.
• People, in life in general, as well as in programming, who
  • regurgitate received wisdom verbatim without having taken the time or trouble to examine it's applicability to the given situation, or to understand it enough to know when it is and is not applicable.
  • through either convenience to themselves, or waryness of the unfamiliar, make or adopt a set of rules for themselves, and then believe the rest of the world should abide by them too.
  • judge others by their own rules.
  • think that 'their way', is the only way.
  • judge others for flaws they fail to see in themselves.
  • mistake politness for deference, assertiveness as correctness, experience or reputation for infallability.
• Script kiddies that waste my bandwidth by attempting to scan my machine 500 times every 4 hours looking 'sploits.
• 'Ethical hackers' that feel that exposing the weaknesses in the 'net, is doing the world a favour--and forces of both 'good' and 'evil' that mean that they are right.
• Perveyors of
  • sweeping generalisations.
  • 'holy wars', whether related to religion or not.
  • prejudice of any kind.
  • the NIH and NIMBY syndromes.
  • devisiveness, exclusivity, elitism, xenophobia and cliques.
  • moralism.
• Myself--for having exhibited many the above traits and behaviours at various times, and for being too weak to guard myself from continuing doing so occasionally.

Update:I forgot one.

• Systems, paradigms, methodologies and dogma that stifle innovation.

believe showing me the same advert for the 1000th time is more likely to make me buy the product than it was the previous 999 times.
...with an avarage person that'd be 27 times! r_mehmed

• There's a level of Hell reserved for people who write boolean test properties (like "is_active") that also perform significant modifications to the underlying database (but only some of the time depending on the return value of the test).

Let's see now

• ... people who filter out special directories in File::Find wanted routines with return if /^\.\.?$/
• ... people who use studlyCapsVariables
• ... people who write programs that fail when run from a random current working directory.
• ... people who use random amounts of whitespace and indentation
• ... people who call routines with ampersand (&foo( $arg )).
• ... people who write die $! without any other context to help you analyse the reason for failure.
• ... people who fail to check whether open fails.
• ... people who want to solve a problem yet refuse to install a module that would do the trick nicely.
• ... people who scrape web pages with regexps.
• ... people who continue to write templating systems, database mini-languages and CGI parameter parsers in this day and age.
• and ... people who moan about Perl 6.

You forgot a few:

• ... people who use way_too_may_underscores_in_variables
• ... people who limit themselves by only using modules and never rewriting the code to truly understand how it works.
• ... people who have never tried to scrape web pages with regexps.
• ... people who think that templating systems, parameter parsers, etc should not be written just because they're bored of them (and decent ones already exist). There's always room for improvement.

As for my own, I have only one:

• There is a special place in Los Angeles reserved for those who would sit back criticizing other programming languages without ever having used them.

I'd rather see too many underscores than abiglongvariablenameallasoneword. But then again, my text editor tries to autocomplete words (and does a fairly good job), so long variables aren't a big deal to me...

Should you write your own templating system for fun? Yes. Should you use it in a project for your company? No. Should you put it on CPAN? No.

When I see people doing this kind of thing, I think "you must have a lot of time on your hands." Personally, I find that even after I use high-quality CPAN modules wherevere possible there is still plenty of coding to do, and the coding that's left is the part that is supplying actual value to my employer by solving their specific problem (as opposed to general problems like processing templates).

And what if there really is no template system that does what you need? Take one that's close and hack it, and submit the patches back to the maintainer. When Template Toolkit was not fast enough for us to use at eToys, we hacked it to make it much faster and then gave the code to the author. He used the ideas in it as the basis for a later release that we eventually ended up using.

... people who filter out special directories in File::Find wanted routines with return if /^\.\.?$/

Umm whats wrong with that?

---
demerphq

There's a level of Hell reserved for

• people who don't write tests
• people who remove a failing test, rather than fix their code so the test passes - because the test "must be wrong"
• people who don't reduce failing code to a minimal test case
• bug reports that just say "it does not work"
• people who roll their own version of X because it will be more efficient
  1. before finding out whether more efficiency is needed
  2. and write something less efficient than X anyway
• people who don't use CPAN

Paraphrasing Dante Alighieri's Inferno:

Limbo ring: where virtuos but non-Perl coders live

Lustful ring: those who betrayed reason to their appetite

Gluttonous ring: those who programmed in excesses and reinvent wheels

Avaricious and the Prodigal level: those who wasted, programmed greedily and insatiably

Wrathful and the Gloomy ring: those who give crude and vindictive answers

Heretics level: those who failed to believe in Perl and Perl 6

Suicides levels: those who gave up programming Perl

Fraudulence and Malice level (pimps, hypocrites, simonists, barraters, magicians, diviners, seducers, fortune tellers, panderers): marketing people

The final circle of Hell: betrayers to those in which we should be forever faithful: God, Family and Perl :)

Ciao, Valerio

There's a level of Hell reserved for people that are told to change their password because flower is too easy to crack, and they put in flowers

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz

At least they didn't change it to password or secret. ;)

Don't be that sure, my friend. I found one, say, Clark Kent, that put in "Clark" as a password. When I complained and ordered him to change it to a real password, he say "but how will I remember my password if it is more difficult than that?".

There is no lower limit to intelligence, it seems :-)

Ciao!
--bronto

---

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz

There's a level of Hell reserved for:

• ...people who don't actually know anything about the environment they're working on.
• ...people that seem unable to delete all those random files that just filled up the disk whilst I was testing.
• ...people who write 100 page documents when 5 would have been clearer.
• ...people that don't even consider consulting perldoc or manpages first.
• ...programmers that don't know how to program.
• ...programmers who don't know how to comment.
• ...managers that don't understand that a handful of CPAN modules will save me several weeks work, if only I could get them to consider approving their use.
• ...people (particularly managers) who don't understand just how annoying the mobile phone that's ringing whilst I've been trying to think really is.
• ...job agencies that never get back to you.
• ...job agencies that get back to you 6 months after you find a job elsewhere.
• ...Microsoft :-)

I re-wrote the whole thing to make it work in the "required time"

Sorry about that, but we have to protect our income somehow :)

Disclaimer: that's not the kind of code I write, but I know a lot of contractors who do :(

rdfield

What would permies do if they didn't have long since departed contractors to blame for their project problems? If they didn't exist, they would need a series of departmental meetings to invent them.

@hellions = qw |
[download]

non-programmer project managers who decide on their own how long a project will take and present that as a deadline to their coders.

project managers who insist that you drop your critical modifications to the database structure, or your fix of the memory leak, because the GUI's colour scheme needs to be fixed *now*.

web designers who design a page so badly they force horizontal scrolling

web designers who believe "cross-browser" means compatible with "both" browsers

programmers who believe "cross-platform" means compatible with Win9x and NT/2k

monks who post really long lines of code in a SoPW, forcing me to scroll horizontally. (for instance, a 200-character hex string to be unpacked.)

monks who frontpage really long lines of code in a SoPW, forcing me to scroll horizontally.

all the stupid $@#! users where I work, who turn off their UPSs and wonder why their computers suddenly go dark and won't turn on, who get confused when they see a "You may now safely turn off your computer" message because they don't know where the power button is, much less the reset button.

    |;
#
# UPDATE: reformatted code and pushed some stuff
push @hellions, qw |
[download]

programmers who write version checking using == instead of >=

programmers who write stuff that's not backwards-compatible, therefore requiring a == version check.

    |;
# /UPDATE
print '<ul>', map {
    "<li>There's a level of Hell reserved for $_.</li>"
} @hellions , '</li>';
[download]

LAI
:eof

As for the latter, I strongly believe computers shouldn't be turned off on a regular bases (with the exception of laptops). Power buttons on a computer should be out of reach from a users - the fact that the typical intel or intel compatible hardware has a big reset and or on/off button at the front is scary.

Abigail

Laptops aren't meant to be turned off either - that's what the suspend button is for. I reconfigured all of my "Power" buttons to trigger the suspend/reanimate routines and unless I'm forced to, don't ever reboot.

---

Seeking Green geeks in Minnesota

Oh, I would love it if it were impossible for the users to interact with any part of the ensemble but the viewscreen part of the monitor (keep even that power button away from them), the keyboard (preferably the kind I don't have to fish two dozen staples out of every now and again) and the mouse. But they're all using Windows of course, so every now and again it'll completely lock up, or turn itself off, or whatever, and I don't feel like getting off my lazy ass to the cube farm every time that happens.

Of course, I pretty much do anyway. Damn, I hate them sometimes.

LAI
:eof

The size of a button indicates its importance and usage frequency.

The reset button in your wrist watch for example is tiny and cannot be reached without a pin. As opposed to the reset button on the Intel PCs which gets used more than you ever use the keyboard.

---

He who asks will be a fool for five minutes, but he who doesn't ask will remain a fool for life.

Chady | http://chady.net/

• ... webdesigners who think it is great to use a full screen mode.
• ... webdesigners who like to take control of *my* browser.
• ... webdesigners who think that it is a service to me if they protect me from browsing their pages with another browser than Netscape 4.xx or IE (ge 4). (The only page with an error is the frontpage.)

-derby

Welcome to corporate hell. Where Word/Excel/Powerpoint files are the norm and where PHBs like to send you meeting notifications via Outlook.

-- vek --

Or people who embed a 2-3MB Excel spreadsheet to show a single cell...

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cheers,
Erik

Light a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Catch a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchet

Subject: Ah but... reply

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke.

... webdesigners who disable the right-click on their page.

Dude, Edit->Preferences->Appearances->Fonts and set the minimum font size to about 12 or 14. Problem solved. You are using a recent version of Mozilla, of course, right? Most of the previous user's complaints can be solved too. The one thing Moz doesn't do yet is scale images down to prevent the need for horizontal scrolling. There's a bug filed on that, but it hasn't been fixed yet.

---

for(unpack("C*",'GGGG?GGGG?O__\?WccW?{GCw?Wcc{?Wcc~?Wcc{?~cc'
.'W?')){$j=$_-63;++$a;for$p(0..7){$h[$p][$a]=$j%2;$j/=2}}for$
p(0..7){for$a(1..45){$_=($h[$p-1][$a])?'#':' ';print}print$/}
[download]

I'd rather be able to use the wheel to zoom the window as I feel like it. Sometimes I want to sit back and relax and read something; other times I'm in normal work position closer to the screen. So, I want to just disable the font size pegging. Use their size as a starting value, sure. I think Opera zooms by changing the window world coordinate system mapping, so a "8 point font" can be an inch tall, without the layout engine caring or being any the wiser. And that scales the images, too!

No, I've not tried Mozilla except once in the very early days. Maybe I'll give it a shot. I'm hooked on the Google toolbar, though... and things like MSDN and CHM files insist on using IE, so I'll have to know two systems.

—John

My #1 annoyance: People who ask for help, then ask for it again, without any evidance of haivng taken the first advice, or giving reasons why they did not. (OK, that may be construed as picking on my fellow-monk, but I didn't name names.) #2..Inf will come when I have more time.

Actualy, #2 will come now: People who nitpick code given as off-the-cuff ideas. And #3, people who think spelling is important, even when they understand what was said perfectly.

I've probably done all of those, of course.

evidance is spelled evidence. ;)

(don't -- me, this is a joke! :) )

Well, I suppose you could -- me if the joke isn't funny...

psst... I think he did that on purpose to see if anyone would point it out :P

---

If the above content is missing any vital points or you feel that any of the information is misleading, incorrect or irrelevant, please feel free to downvote the post. At the same time, reply to this node or /msg me to tell me what is wrong with the post, so that I may update the node to the best of my ability. If you do not inform me as to why the post deserved a downvote, your vote does not have any significance and will be disregarded.

• Marketing people who sell products that don't exist and then wonder why the ship date they promised is missed.
• Marketing people who leave at 11am on Friday while the development team is stuck in the office until 8pm trying to meet a deadline.
• PHBs that drop $2000 on a brand-new laptop for a marketing person two weeks before his first day while making developers wait six months and then spend money out of their own pockets (to be reimbursed at the company's leisure) to get reasonably-performing workstations.

..coworker! Thanks for covering me yesterday :)

TALIHRF:


• perl2exe and associated miscreants
• anyone scornful of vi :)
• application and OS developers that by writing mis/disfunctional software force admins to be either apologists or "that bastard" in IT.
• you mongrel script-kiddies who try ..\..\cmd.exe `sploits on *nix servers
• said mongrels who take action after you have a nice long chat with his ISP's network admin

I could write more I think, but only at the risk of becoming OT and probably Rude!.

I can't believe it's not psellchecked

• People who insist on interruping you when you're coding because they don't believe you're doing anything *that* important.
• People who don't believe you're working when you're trying to research a Perl point on Perl Monks.

Update

• People who are intent on placing blame rather than fixing the problem at hand.

There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.

Wozzit Samuel Clemens who suggested that we should "go to Heaven for the climate; go to Hell for the company"? I'd hate to end up sizzling in the lake of fire next to a fscking marketroid....

Anyhoo, I'd love to see one or several kinds of people burn for eternity:

• Marketeers who avoid any kind of knowledge about the product/project/service that they're selling: fr'instance, the one who promised a customer of mine that they'd be able to get valid email addresses over Caller ID(!).
• People who take criticism of their projects or products as personal attacks.
• People (and I use the term quite loosely) who deliberately avoid revision-control systems.
• People who check known-broken builds into revision-control systems.
• People who write like wankers.
• So-called programmers who can't be arsed to learn De Morgan's Laws, and write baroque and incomprehensible conditionals as a consequence.
• Anyone who, while reviewing someone else's code, changes arbitrary bits of the codebase into their own coding style (hello, Russell! (note: as far as I can tell, that's not russell, but a different Russell)).

--
F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
Found a typo in this node? /msg me
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!

As for your writing like a wanker rant, need I point out the following:

• English isn't everyone's first language.
• Your local sayings aren't the same as everyone else's
• email is shorter and faster to type than e-mail.
• Poor punctuation and spelling are hardly going to kill you. The vast majority of the time they won't even slow down your reading let alone make the point incomprehensible.

As for proprietary file formats in public discussion forums, it's a good thing. If the format is in wide use, it will become open and reduce user's dependency on it. Mind u, those, l4m3rs f*ckin piss me off 2 ;-)

There's also a difference between sending an e-mail to your friends and professional writing for work. What is acceptable in one case is not in the other. Poor punctuation and spelling are a real problem if they are part of the documentation written by a highly paid consultant.

There is no place in hell (cos even the Devil doesn't want 'em), for those W****** who cite other W****** to excuse their habit of critiquing the format of the message, instead of it's content.

yall just sayin that cause ya cant spell write, how ya can hit that there starrylookin key so much is not right but I reckon that there idea ya got bout what he means instead of bein purty is deep.

8^)

--traveler

There's a level of Hell reserved for Product Managers who decide to change the name of the product after you're in code freeze.

What, you mean you don't code the product name into the conf file?

I'm working on a product that won't be named for a month. And it's being released in a month. And it only has a spoof name for now.

Knowing marketing, it will change names several times before it goes live ;-) So the only solution is to put the name as a var in the conf file.

Fact of life, not level of hell :)

.02

cLive ;-)

indent_the_arguments_of_long_functions( like, 
                                        this,
                                        you,
                                        morons );
[download]

++ for that one alone. Thank goodness for Perltidy.

open F, ">$tmp"; print F @a; print F $new_item; close F;
open F, "<$tmp"; @a = <F>; close F;
[download]

Wow, that's worse than what I had to deal with in UBB5.

And I agree with the point about GUIs, though I feel I have to point out that for simple things they can be far more convenient than the commandline. I'm thinking iTunes here. Of course, it's actually very hard to design a good graphical interface, and the majority of what's around just sucks.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Um, doesn't perltidy indent the arguments too? After all, that is the generally accepted style for Perl.

people who don't understand why it never made sense for Perl to have a switch statement.

If this is the case {grin}, why is it the case?

Why does Switch exist?

Why is Perl6 going to have Given/When?

There's also a special place in heaven for those who understand why it makes sense for Perl6 to have given/when.

jdporter
The 6th Rule of Perl Club is -- There is no Rule #6.

...people who

    indent_the_arguments_of_long_functions( like, 
                                            this,
                                            you,
                                            morons );
[download]

Oh what's wrong with that! Honestly, some people just don't have an appreciation for code aesthetics! (or 80 character line width restrictions) (-:

... for coworkers who send email with multi-megabyte attachments when I'm dialed in on the road.

... for executives who start each answer to a question with "That's a very good question" then immediately change the subject.

• ...programmers who create multiple packages in one file, and each package has subroutines with the same name. (So if I call the sub do_something, which one is it calling?)
• ...managers who decide to switch compilers two weeks before the code is sent to formal analysis
• ...fanatics. I hate fanatics.

• ...Marketing executroids. All of them. From their inability to recognize a good idea that they didn't steal themselves to their belief that shipping on time is more important than shipping a good product, they are a blight on the planet, and will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.
• ...Managers who assign responsibility without granting authority.
• ...Managers who assign "rush projects" on Friday afternoon.
• ...Microsoft.
• ...Programmers who don't bathe.
• ...Product Managers who change the spec halfway through the development cycle. "Uh, as it turns out, Oracle isn't a free database. We need you to make the system work with MySQL by next Monday because we can't slip the release."
• ...Product Managers who make radical changes to the spec every release. "It'll be the same product, but instead of C and Perl under BSD, it'll be Java under Windows NT."

-Logan
"What do I want? I'm an American. I want more."

There's a level of Hell reserved for:

• ... people who refuse to give me Read Only access to a database forcing me instead to fork and try to emulate a human interacting with the Evil CLI instead of using DBI and friends. because some time long ago someone wrote a complex query that was poorly optimized by the DB and ended up causing lot's of grief. and they types of queries i need would be lighter on the DB than the CLI (which fetches much more info from across several tables that i don't need).
• ... the same people again, because they Don't have a problem with making me my own copy of the database to do with as i wish served up by the same instance of the DB that serves up the original. go figure!

• Programmers who don't see the importance of untainting data
• Programmers who immediately hit up Perlmonks or clpm asking a basic question when perldoc whatever would suffice
• Clients who harp on deadlines, yet do not return calls or get information back to the programmers in time for them to meet the deadlines.
• People who say, "You program in Perl? I've tried to pick that up, but it looks like gibberish."
• People who don't appreciate good gibberish when they see it. :)
• Ex-programmer bosses who say, "Hey, I could have had this fully-working CGI application working in three days, why is it taking you a week?" I mean, who cares if his programming came in the form of 24-hour code marathons and mine was limited to 8-10 hour days.
• People who seriously get heated about their choice of text editor. I mean, come on! We all know vi is the way to go, so stop your whining.
• Perl code that uses C-style for loops instead of foreach, etc.
• People who can't smile at the subtle beauty in calling a reference to a array containing references to hashes. Perl's native data structures are a beautiful thing.

There's a level of Hell reserved for

• people who think that coolness is more important than stability
• people who use prototypes on methods as a gotcha for procedural calls
• people in the Perl community who don't care if their software works/builds on MS machines
• people who think that users should learn cryptic CLI interfaces when they don't even have time to learn simple GUI's
• programmers that take weeks to write a GUI that reproduces the behaviour of a common CLI tool or a Perl one liner and then expect you to be impressed
• those who can't accept that VB is an excellent GUI development tool
• those who can't see that theres more to do in programming than making sure that their VB data grid looks cool.

• those that only know VB
• every MS excec that voted 'no' on maintaining good links with the Open Source Community
• people who don't use source control
• coworkers who don't answer emails in a reasonably prompt fashion
• people who use M$ as a way to put down Microsoft Products, but whose experience of the same is limited to 9x/Me or even worse DOS
• users who think "it doesnt work" is a good error description, even though the bug report form has countless hints to provide more useful information
• those who think that all phone numbers are in (XXX)YYY-ZZZZ format.
• web site developers that think that the only two countries in the world are "USA" and "CAN"
• web site developers that think that the only two countries in the world with states are "USA" and "CAN"
• people who think that if an OS doesn't do something the same way as *NIX does, that the OS must be violating some standard
• whoever was responsible for the fact that even though the world pretty much universally uses arabic numerals, we can't settle on just one symbol for the decimal point
• everyone who thinks that YY/MM/DD or MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY or pretty well anything other than YYYY/MM/DD is a sane way to write a readable date stamp

• for every person who says "we can't do that, we've never done it before"
• who --'d you without a good reason ;-)
• people who think that they should endlessly profit from a lucky few years of intellectual activity when whatever they built was only on the shoulders of countless unsung others before them
• people who dont document their code
• people who don't read the documentation
• people who write useless documentation
• comments that lie

... me. And it's called life.

Jenda