Italian

Here is an email I received in response to my essay on how to write unmaintainable code.

Italian : Mike Nakagawa : mike_nakagawa@agilent.com : 2000-11-02

Your page struck a few chords since I’ve been called in to maintain code written by folks long gone on several occasions. One thing I didn’t see was the use of an automated language translator. I had been trying to decipher some code originally written in Fortran (with array indices beginning with 1) that had been passed through a code translator into C (with array indices beginning with 0). My suggestion, write in Fortran and keep the source private, translate to C and release that.

Other notes: I had tried to interpret code written by an Italian programmer, who was kind enough to comment in English, but the variables were in Italian. Conversely, to aid the ability to maintain your own code without helping others, comment anything confusing in your native foreign language, while appearing not to be hiding behind the language in the “official” source code statements.

On CapiTaliSaTion, the example was ComputeRasterHistoGram(). Wouldn’t ComputerAsTerhIsToGram() be a better example?

Finally, my Data Structures prof stopped a lecture as he was talking about supportability and said, roughly, “If I were a programmer in a business, I would write the most confusing code possible, because as long as I were there, I’d be the big guy as the only one who could support the code. And if I were to leave the company for some reason, I’d want to get back at them.”

thanks for the site.

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