“C” Players

On a professional level, I try very hard to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and reject categorizations of people’s competence in their jobs unless there is literally no way to characterize someone as anything other than incompetent. Then again, there are simply some people you encounter whose continued presence among the living constitutes a negative net benefit to the continued existence of the human race.

Today, I had the unavoidable need to enter the following comment into code I was writing that interacts with someone else’s system. I had to really consider the fact that this person might one day read this comment, so I did not make it lightly or without forethought. In the end, I chose to leave it in the code as a necessary explanation for the mentally deranged-seeming coding choices I was forced to make, so that future engineers could maintain the code without losing their minds…

‘Prtcnt table definition formatting, naming convention, and numbering are all
‘hosed, because someone doesn’t understand what a standard is. Fixing this
‘in code would require manipulating the msREGEX object from Basic Control
‘Language (cimBasic), which is a massive task not worth the effort.
‘Therefore, in this case, we have to hard-code column names to get
‘access to the data.
‘[Addendum]Oh, also, as it turns out, defective coder forgot to even
‘specify the identifiers for the last three columns of the table in the
‘table definition, so code couldn’t fix it anyway! Divining column functions
‘via labor-intensive iterative process henceforth known as “plug and pray”…
‘[Addendum – 2]On further analysis, it seems that defective coder added one
‘record to the table that has different column names and purposes from the
‘rest of the rows in the table, effectively shoehorning two tables into one
‘file with no table definition or schema at all provided for one of them.
‘Divining secondary table purpose and definition via “plug and pray” methodology…
About the Author

Despite a decade of Catholic school, I have never been a believer. I guess I was just born without the gene! Nevertheless, I've always tried to explore others' ideas and practices, on the theory that just because you can't use one part of a product, it doesn't mean you have to throw the whole thing away.
I spent over a decade traveling the world, and I've lived in both Europe and the US. I've read the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Koran. I've studied engineering, yoga, martial arts, shooting sports, and ballroom dancing. What I've discovered is that a) spirituality is just a spooky sounding word for any of a number of methods for learning about yourself and your mind, and b) whatever word you use, doing so is the single most important thing in learning to be happy.
My blog, The Passionate Rationalist (http://www.societyofreason.com/devoutrationalist) is dedicated to my thoughts both on gaining self-knowledge and using your mind to eliminate misunderstanding and delusion.