This seems to go back to the saying "a bad programmer can write COBOL in any language"; no matter how good your tools, it doesn't prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot.
I have seen such horrors firsthand. A Smalltalk subsystem where all methods were class-side methods, only referred to local variables, and had variations of the same long list of arguments. All of these methods were copy and paste variants of each other and involved nested loops, multiple incrementing indexed array references, and conditional logic 4 or 5 levels deep. The coder who wrote these: a PhD in math who insisted she had a great understanding of Objects.
What's more, she's outlasted everyone in the group and is now in charge of the entire application!
In her case, it was an adeptness at gaming the corporate management system. After she wrote that code, she managed to put herself in a nebulous position between two groups where she was thought to be invaluable, yet all she did was to tell other people when they were doing something wrong, but never actually had to fix anything. You could often see her at the coffee shop reading a novel in the middle of the day.
Say what you like about COBOL but don't knock COBOL programmers. How much of your code will still be running in 40 years? COBOL programmers are the perfect example of what good people can do with "bad" tools.
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This seems to go back to the saying "a bad programmer can write COBOL in any language"; no matter how good your tools, it doesn't prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot.
I have seen such horrors firsthand. A Smalltalk subsystem where all methods were class-side methods, only referred to local variables, and had variations of the same long list of arguments. All of these methods were copy and paste variants of each other and involved nested loops, multiple incrementing indexed array references, and conditional logic 4 or 5 levels deep. The coder who wrote these: a PhD in math who insisted she had a great understanding of Objects.
What's more, she's outlasted everyone in the group and is now in charge of the entire application!
survival of the fittest. maybe we'll all be coding like that in 15 years.
In her case, it was an adeptness at gaming the corporate management system. After she wrote that code, she managed to put herself in a nebulous position between two groups where she was thought to be invaluable, yet all she did was to tell other people when they were doing something wrong, but never actually had to fix anything. You could often see her at the coffee shop reading a novel in the middle of the day.
Say what you like about COBOL but don't knock COBOL programmers. How much of your code will still be running in 40 years? COBOL programmers are the perfect example of what good people can do with "bad" tools.