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Thank you for the new word.
Still not sure where I'm going to use 'campanologist', but it might ring a bell at some point.
TTFN - Kent
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Bad code isn’t just a problem for developers to solve whenever they’ve cleared other tasks from their queue—it has a measurable impact on company profitability, according to a recent study by Stripe. Yeah, sorry. My bad.
"Stripe believes that bad code and technical debt costs companies around the world some $85 billion annually."
I'm not quite that bad.
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It doesn't even have to be bad code; I've found that dated code has a big impact. Also worthwhile to point out that bad code didn't always start that way, especially with dated code.
Another big, if not more frequent, issue is when the architecture of an app doesn't accommodate a brand new feature. A non-silly example is designing a great car and then years later try to make it all electric. Yeah, you can probably do it, but at best it will less than optimal.
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The car analogy is a good one - maybe a shift from petrol to electric is a bit drastic but we've all seen good cars transformed into bad ones by someone saying "Hey! Let's improve it by putting in a better engine!"
Yes, the new engine is better, it's smaller, way lighter and still gives us a good few extra horses along the way but suddenly the balance of the car which was perfect for the heavyweight engine of yore is all over the place, the gearbox isn't in tune with the extra power, the tyres are all wrong etc., etc. with the net result that the Mk I becomes far more valued than the Mk II and the Mark III that attempts to address the issues created by the Mk II.
But, the old engine no longer passes emissions tests and is stupidly expensive to run so it's no longer viable. The company can't afford to design a completely new car around the new motor and it's devil vs. deep blue sea arguments left, right and centre.
TD will always be a factor in anything (good news for any kind of engineer in the sense that it keeps us employed!), we just have to minimise it in the best way that we can.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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PeejayAdams wrote: we've all seen good cars transformed into bad ones by someone saying "Hey! Let's improve it by putting in a better engine!"
And spoilers are called spoilers with good reason.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Great points!
I currently have a project which is just over a year old and I'm already starting to feel it.
The code is pretty good and all, but last year I've learned so much new stuff that if I had to start it now it would look completely different.
And then you're left with a choice, do I continue with the "old style" programming for consistency or will I start with my "new style" programming, and if yes will I convert the old code as well?
It's a choice you have to make every time you touch the old code base.
Sometimes the choice is clear or someone else made it for you, other times it's not...
Joe Woodbury wrote: A non-silly example is designing a great car and then years later try to make it all electric.
Just switch out the IEngine implementation 
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Joe Woodbury wrote: A non-silly example is designing a great car and then years later try to make it all electric. Yeah, you can probably do it, but at best it will less than optimal.
Given that it doesn't impact most of the car, and normal electrical wire being used in the same places where you'd expect them, I'd say it does NOT make such a huge difference as you try to have us believe.
To the contrary; it is often abused to justify starting anew (think Tesla) and fail even bigger.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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More waste of productive hours: having to learn the latest trendy language/JavaScript library/rearrangement of Windows OS and/or Visual Studio UI.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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AlphaZero, a general-purpose game-playing system, quickly taught itself to be the best player ever in Go, chess and Shogi As long as there's an off switch, we can always win
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Not exactly; it had some help.
And, damn, even Graham didn't get the Holy Grail.
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OK, I think that they and I might have slightly differing opinions on what qualifies as a good comparison to the Holy Grail.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The Snapdragon 8cx is a higher-end processor for Windows on Snapdragon. The first CPU that also snow boards and has tattoos
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From the article: Qualcomm is calling this the "most extreme GPU (it) has ever made.
Unlike, of course, the last three GPUs it made, which it described as not being as good as the one they'd made five years earlier.
I'd love to know what goes through people's heads, when they're writing such ridiculous marketing bumf.
My money's on flies and tumbleweeds.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Yeah,But Can It Run Crysis?
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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Imagine not having to charge your phone or laptop for weeks. That is the dream of researchers looking into alternative batteries that go beyond the current lithium-ion versions popular today. Plus, no cavities!
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Well,
(wait for it)
(wait for it)
... It looks like they know their anions!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The future of IT infrastructure is about being always on, and always available, everywhere, according to a presentation by Gartner at its IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies, held this week in Las Vegas. As opposed to how we wanted our infrastructure in the past, I guess
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Just when you think Gartner can't get any more daft...
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Gartner waffled: Death of the data center
Gartner expects 80 percent of enterprise to move to the cloud or colocation and hosting sites by 2025
Yup, because cloud services providers don't use big, cooled rooms with lots of server racks, do they?
The only difference between a data centre owned and run by you and a data centre owned and run by someone else is... well, the clue is in the sentence itself.
Distributed models for data storage and access have been around for decades, but "The cloud" is not distributed data storage and access; it's just someone else's servers and storage.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Starting today, the Rust 2018 edition is in its first release. With this edition, we’ve focused on productivity… on making Rust developers as productive as they can be. "A reddish- or yellowish-brown flaky coating of iron oxide that is formed on iron or steel by oxidation, especially in the presence of moisture." But that's not important right now.
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Lin Clary wrote: With this edition, we’ve focused on productivity
Oh, well, that's **cked it, then.
As soon as some idiot starts going on about "productivity improvements in software", you just know that that translates to:
I don't actually use it myself (I just work here), but I think that if I did use it, I would want it to work this way -- and I obviously know better that than people who use it every day in ways that I don't understand, to do work that I don't even understand.
Just make everything easy to find, Boys. Let US worry about OUR productivity.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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While in the general case I tend to agree, in this case Rust is largely community-driven. It's just that currently a lot of the community are at Mozilla, who are still the main users of Rust. So "productivity improvements" in this case are driven by real developers who use the language day-to-day.
The development of Rust is very open - new proposals are visible and proposals from third parties are accepted and integrated.
So far they seem to be heading in a good direction.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: on making Rust developers as productive as they can be.
So, we've included a copy of Visual Studio Community Edition with the option of C# or C++.
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Here I am going to take you on a little guided tour through three new C# features you can try out in the preview. A reminder of future features
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