{"id":186,"date":"2010-02-18T21:09:55","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T01:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/?p=186"},"modified":"2010-02-18T21:09:55","modified_gmt":"2010-02-19T01:09:55","slug":"is-programming-all-marshmallows-and-toothpicks-or-is-it-just-web-apps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/18\/is-programming-all-marshmallows-and-toothpicks-or-is-it-just-web-apps\/","title":{"rendered":"Is programming all marshmallows and toothpicks, or is it just web apps?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been doing some maintenance programming for a few days solid (rare for me to get to program that much), and I again find myself amazed that any software works at all.\u00c2\u00a0 I&#8217;ve only been programming seriously for about a decade (mostly web apps), but it feels like I&#8217;m building rickety crap on top of other people&#8217;s horrible hacks.<\/p>\n<p>The bar for quality software seems so abysmally low.\u00c2\u00a0 When coding around some bizarre behavior I&#8217;m seeing out of the .NET framework, I know I&#8217;m introducing weird brittle bits.\u00c2\u00a0 It feels wrong, but I don&#8217;t see any other option.\u00c2\u00a0 And this is <strong>new code<\/strong>, written for the latest released version of a very popular system!\u00c2\u00a0 It seems like everyone else is doing the same thing in every programming environment I&#8217;ve seen.<\/p>\n<p>My best guess is I&#8217;m working at maybe the 1000th layer of abstraction over the bare metal, and that sounds low.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s a lot of cruft, hacks, bugs, security holes, late-night fixes, bad compromises and coffee.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe my sense of &#8220;clean code&#8221; is just OCD?\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes I wonder if writing good code is just a waste of time.\u00c2\u00a0 Is shoddy copy\/paste winning the evolutionary battle for the software base that will drive humanity for the next millennium?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been doing some maintenance programming for a few days solid (rare for me to get to program that much), and I again find myself amazed that any software works at all.\u00c2\u00a0 I&#8217;ve only been programming seriously for about a decade (mostly web apps), but it feels like I&#8217;m building rickety crap on top of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,39,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annoying","category-rant","category-whiny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":192,"href":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions\/192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ryepup.unwashedmeme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}