The Curse Arises Once Again
Today I spent most of my day dealing with a horrible system that has been folded, spindled, and mutilated far more than anything I've ever seen. This code has methods like:
void klugeToGetAroundAnotherFatAssBug( ... ); void klugeToGetAroundAnotherFatAssBug_node( ... );
and I'm not kidding, either. The old coders of this mess didn't think enough of the even older coders of this mess to write decent methods and just fix things. No, they had to make it personal. This is what I'm walking into. I really hate it.
Anyway, today I had to try and track down a data problem that was effecting just one instrument in the application. I looked in the tables in one of the databases it uses, and found the table the data should be in. Nope... it's empty. Nice try. But then why keep the table there? Just to mess with people's heads?
Then it hit me - it's The Curse. Good, decent programmers have to work on this code and it is such an incredible burden to them that they go insane and go work in flower shops, or pump gas for a living. It's painful, but it's real.
I want to get this solved, and then document a few things about this mess and then move on. It's not going to be easy, and it's certainly no fun, but it's what I do.