See previous post about too many bad devs running around. It's not brand new. They are and have been everywhere.

From newscientist.com:

Parking meters, cash registers and a professional wrestling video game have fallen foul of a computer glitch related to the Y2K bug.

…

Programmers wanting to avoid the Y2K bug had two broad options: entirely rewrite their code, or adopt a quick fix called “windowing”, which would treat all dates from 00 to 20, as from the 2000s, rather than the 1900s. An estimated 80 per cent of computers fixed in 1999 used the quicker, cheaper option.

“Windowing, even during Y2K, was the worst of all possible solutions because it kicked the problem down the road,” says Dylan Mulvin at the London School of Economics.

Because of course they did.

Utility company bills have reportedly been produced with the erroneous date 1920, while tens of thousands of parking meters in New York City have declined credit card transactions because of the date glitch.

Would non-windowing require a deeper refactor? Yes. Should they have done that then? Maybe?

The real question is if the developers let their management know the limitations of the fix, and if the managers told the customers.

Because if there's one thing that's lacking as much as good developer instincts in software development, it's managers who can spell "success".

From the same article:

“Fixing bugs in old legacy systems is a nightmare: it’s spaghetti and nobody who wrote it is still around,” says Paul Lomax, who handled the Y2K bug for Vodafone.

"Old legacy systems" you say? That's where code is spaghetti? Lolls.

What you should say is, "any mature codebase". There are always stupid edge conditions captured in that code, which makes it look less like a useless textbook example that faints at the first site of The Real World (c) MTV and more like something that's doing its job.

There is no clean code in production. I mean, there is, and if you handle your method signatures correctly, there's more in your code than elsewhere, but, um, there's not much idealistically pure, ivory tower type sample code making people money. And if there is, it's about to let them down in some serious-yet-unexpected way.

Related..., if you wrote the preceding blog entry in Markdown:

Adding support for a strikethrough syntax is a longstanding request for Markdown, but I omitted it by design. For one thing, there is no good punctuation to represent strikethrough. Tildes don’t look like strikethrough at all — tildes are squiggly, but a strike is a straight line. 

You know what doesn't look like a strikethrough at all, John? <strike></strike> ;^D

Labels: developers, development, fail, markdown