awful programming: feature flags and suffering

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > awful programming: feature flags and suffering

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JawnV6: Jul 4, 2004; So hot ...

DuckConference posted:

is there some sort of tool or cheat sheet for doing like a reverse syntax lookup for c++?

as in �yes this sequence of names, colons, braces, and brackets is defining a something that inherits from something and something and the overrides something and then...�

something like https://cdecl.org ?

# ? Oct 19, 2018 22:55

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# ? Apr 23, 2024 07:24

redleader: Aug 18, 2005; Engage according to operational parameters

CPColin posted:

We should start pretending that they're called "unit" tests because you work on them, together with the rest of the functionality, as a "unit".

noice

# ? Oct 19, 2018 23:02

Symbolic Butt: Mar 22, 2009; (_!_); Buglord

Doom Mathematic posted:

You're in luck! Parsing C++ source code is famously straightforward.

this is one cruel post

# ? Oct 19, 2018 23:08

abraham linksys: Sep 6, 2010

do people who hate the concept of javascript frameworks also write all of their web apps with no abstractions between them and a standard library http api or what

# ? Oct 19, 2018 23:27

Ellie Crabcakes: Feb 1, 2008; Stop emailing my boyfriend Gay Crungus

They don't hate the concept, they hate the execution. It's like saying someone hates the concept of being fingered when it's pretty much just Freddy Kreuger and a velociraptor available to do the deed.

# ? Oct 19, 2018 23:36

prisoner of waffles: May 8, 2007; Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the fishmech
About my neck was hung.

Doom Mathematic posted:

You're in luck! Parsing C++ source code is famously straightforward.

Peeny Cheez posted:

They don't hate the concept, they hate the execution. It's like saying someone hates the concept of being fingered when it's pretty much just Freddy Kreuger and a velociraptor available to do the deed.

# ? Oct 19, 2018 23:46

mystes: May 31, 2006

Nah this was too tasteless, sorry.

mystes fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Oct 20, 2018

# ? Oct 20, 2018 00:17

TheFluff: Dec 13, 2006; FRIENDS, LISTEN TO ME
I AM A SEAGULL
OF WEALTH AND TASTE

writing any kind of moderately complex gui app is a pain in the rear end in pretty much any plang I can think of. javascript as a language is bad but you can't really blame it for the fact that managing a spaghetti mess of stateful garbage is just really obnoxious in general.

# ? Oct 20, 2018 00:34

DELETE CASCADE: Oct 25, 2017; i haven't washed my penis since i jerked it to a phtotograph of george w. bush in 2003

it doesn't have to be stateful, you're just unwilling to reload the drat page, because you're building poo poo that shouldn't exist

# ? Oct 20, 2018 00:57

mystes: May 31, 2006

DELETE CASCADE posted:

it doesn't have to be stateful, you're just unwilling to reload the drat page, because you're building poo poo that shouldn't exist

Isn't the whole reason that SPAs are so popular that it's much easier to be lazy and keep the state in the browser? At least SPAs are less horrible than that Seaside continuation bullshit that people keep reinventing.

# ? Oct 20, 2018 01:03

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; I love peeps; Nap Ghost

everyone is convinced everyone is gonna stay on the page for 4 hours when the empirics say 6 seconds and 3 of those seconds is loading the bigass spa

# ? Oct 20, 2018 01:07

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

mystes posted:

Isn't the whole reason that SPAs are so popular that it's much easier to be lazy and keep the state in the browser? At least SPAs are less horrible than that Seaside continuation bullshit that people keep reinventing.

nah, it's just because they think it looks nicer

# ? Oct 20, 2018 01:10

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

The main reason is zero-footprint and full functionality. Second place is probably the RAD and easy deployment.

State in the browser drastically simplifies the server side infrastructure and thus increases stability and performance.

Companies loving centralised certification management are a big hold back though for deployment of HTTPS-only features like service workers. Having to always work through a clunky F5 is a fluorescent monkey dance.

MrMoo fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Oct 20, 2018

# ? Oct 20, 2018 01:23

Corla Plankun: May 8, 2007; improve the lives of everyone

TheFluff posted:

writing any kind of moderately complex gui app is a pain in the rear end in pretty much any plang I can think of. javascript as a language is bad but you can't really blame it for the fact that managing a spaghetti mess of stateful garbage is just really obnoxious in general.

i agree with this but i think everyone thinks their poo poo is "moderately complex" when actually almost nothing is

jira is literally just grouping and printing checklists but somehow that poo poo takes longer to load than my actual entire os does

# ? Oct 20, 2018 01:29

H2Eau: Jun 2, 2010

DaTroof posted:

imo that's the #1 argument for using ci and writing unit tests first. more for the benefit of bureaucracy than the development process itself

if you tell management the feature works but you haven't written unit tests yet, they might tell you to skip it

if you tell them the build is broken, they'll panic and give it top priority

naive question, because I think I work at a place that is pretty good about this sort of stuff - is it normal at a lot of places for management to interfere and dictate how delivery teams get the work done?
where I work I'd be in the poo poo for not adequately testing, and i never get told directly what to do and how to do it

# ? Oct 20, 2018 01:30

Corla Plankun: May 8, 2007; improve the lives of everyone

"oh dang is jira down--oh nvm its just inexplicably taking 45 seconds to load a list of four textboxes with 40px avatars abutted"
- me every single morning at my job

# ? Oct 20, 2018 01:31

abraham linksys: Sep 6, 2010

i remember asana and slack were two companies that were very publicly proud of having home rolled their own JS frameworks, and of course they both became monstrous and awful, and now they're both being/were rewritten in react, so that's cool

github also did this with atom (though tbf i think they actually rewrote the main editor in react and then once again back to vanilla js because of perf issues, but, yknow, don't build a loving text editor core in a framework that isn't specifically optimized for that) and going all in on turbolinks of all fuckin things for the main site

abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Oct 20, 2018

# ? Oct 20, 2018 01:37

prisoner of waffles: May 8, 2007; Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the fishmech
About my neck was hung.

abraham linksys posted:

i remember asana and slack were two companies that were very publicly proud of having home rolled their own JS frameworks, and of course they both became monstrous and awful, and now they're both being/were rewritten in react, so that's cool

github also did this with atom (though tbf i think they actually rewrote the main editor in react and then once again back to vanilla js because of perf issues, but, yknow, don't build a loving text editor core in a framework that isn't specifically optimized for that) and going all in on turbolinks of all fuckin things for the main site

Honest question coming from a place of pure ignorance: what's wrong with turbolinks? Sounds like a reasonable compromise between a "one HTTP request per view" back-end and a "walks like an SPA, quacks like an SPA" frontend

# ? Oct 20, 2018 01:49

abraham linksys: Sep 6, 2010

prisoner of waffles posted:

Honest question coming from a place of pure ignorance: what's wrong with turbolinks? Sounds like a reasonable compromise between a "one HTTP request per view" back-end and a "walks like an SPA, quacks like an SPA" frontend

this analogy is a bit of a stretch, but turbolinks is kinda like the css cascade in one of those things that works out very well for the people who put a lot of time and thought into working with it, and terribly for the other 90% of people

basically: the kind of javascript code people usually want to write for server-rendered, "stateless" (or, more accurately, "short-lived") pages tends to be very "throw some event listeners down and forget about it," whereas turbolinks breaks this idea on a pretty fundamental level

i'm far from a rails expert, but my understanding is that the traditional turbolinks experience is "everything works totally fine until suddenly you transition pages and get a completely baffling javascript error caused by stale state." this article covers some of the issues, and their workaround is a significantly different way of writing your frontend code, which... is fine, except the whole selling point of turbolinks was to not have to write your frontend code differently

and i mean, everyone here who has used the github web interface, especially prior to like 2016 or so, has encountered the common bugs with turbolinks and PJAX-style solutions, where things don't load correctly and don't have error states (because turbolinks means you're not supposed to have to think about it!), or you hit back mid-navigation and the page gets in a hosed up state, etc. these are totally issues in other SPA architectures, but turbolinks seems unique in not giving you the tools to reason about it

i am still sort of interested in pjax-style solutions, but you just need a lot more stuff to make it robust. hell, even turbolinks now has a "sister framework" (launched less than a year ago!) called stimulus that's supposed to be a framework for working with server-rendered html, which is a fantastic idea for turbolinks/pjax, but one that you had to roll yourself until now, and... thus, more jquery spaghetti was born, and in addition to being bad code from the outside was harder to debug because of the pjax stuff happening, and ugh

(currently ripping turbolinks out of our admin panel due to some long-standing bugs we uncovered after i added production frontend error reporting on my 3rd day at work, egh)

# ? Oct 20, 2018 02:04

prisoner of waffles: May 8, 2007; Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the fishmech
About my neck was hung.

Yeahhh, "pretend that this not-at-all a pageloar behaves the same as a pageloar" seems like a recipe for making lots of poo poo break

# ? Oct 20, 2018 02:50

akadajet: Sep 14, 2003

cjs: trying to convince web developers they shouldn't send 10-20 megs of json documents to the web browser and then build a full text index off of that instead of implementing server side search.

# ? Oct 20, 2018 03:07

AggressivelyStupid: Jan 9, 2012

akadajet posted:

cjs: trying to convince web developers they shouldn't send 10-20 megs of json documents to the web browser and then build a full text index off of that instead of implementing server side search.

jesus loving christ

# ? Oct 20, 2018 03:11

akadajet: Sep 14, 2003

AggressivelyStupid posted:

jesus loving christ

i wish i were exaggerating

# ? Oct 20, 2018 03:12

AggressivelyStupid: Jan 9, 2012

I had a fit when we delivered a 4-5mb js bundle at my first job, got it down under a mb but goddamn

# ? Oct 20, 2018 03:16

akadajet: Sep 14, 2003

AggressivelyStupid posted:

I had a fit when we delivered a 4-5mb js bundle at my first job, got it down under a mb but goddamn

It's like people don't realize that 3g internet is still a thing, and this is an app that needs to work in those conditions.

# ? Oct 20, 2018 03:18

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

reminds me of the time i was told to see what i could do to improve the performance of a web frontend because everyone thought the javascript was taking too long to load and display stuff

after i examined it to see what was going on, i responded that i wasn't going to bust my rear end cutting a few ms off the javascript when the server was taking literally ten full seconds to respond to requests

# ? Oct 20, 2018 03:29

akadajet: Sep 14, 2003

Main Paineframe posted:

reminds me of the time i was told to see what i could do to improve the performance of a web frontend because everyone thought the javascript was taking too long to load and display stuff

after i examined it to see what was going on, i responded that i wasn't going to bust my rear end cutting a few ms off the javascript when the server was taking literally ten full seconds to respond to requests

I wish the call to pull down this data only took 10 seconds. It's nuts.

# ? Oct 20, 2018 03:52

Ellie Crabcakes: Feb 1, 2008; Stop emailing my boyfriend Gay Crungus

akadajet posted:

cjs: trying to convince web developers they shouldn't send 10-20 megs of json documents to the web browser and then build a full text index off of that instead of implementing server side search.

make their deaths and move to Belize.

# ? Oct 20, 2018 04:10

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

akadajet posted:

cjs: trying to convince web developers they shouldn't send 10-20 megs of json documents to the web browser and then build a full text index off of that instead of implementing server side search.

i dare you to suggest using a transpiler on lucene and sending that down to the client to build the index

# ? Oct 20, 2018 04:23

akadajet: Sep 14, 2003

Arcsech posted:

i dare you to suggest using a transpiler on lucene and sending that down to the client to build the index

lol no. it's its own thing

but they did try this first
https://lunrjs.com/

# ? Oct 20, 2018 04:38

Arcsech: Aug 5, 2008

akadajet posted:

lol no. it's its own thing

but they did try this first
https://lunrjs.com/

lol i found that googling to see if someone had already done that right after i posted

# ? Oct 20, 2018 05:24

the talent deficit: Dec 20, 2003; self-deprecation is a very british trait, and problems can arise when the british attempt to do so with a foreign culture

people write SPAs in complicated frameworks because users want mobile app like features, complexity and performance in the browser. if you're writing your blog in react you're probably overengineering it but if you're trying to deliver something like gmail or asana or even something fairly simple like youtube you quickly reach a place where the complexity of managing a specific client's state becomes way more tractable with something like react than with something like rails + turbolinks

# ? Oct 20, 2018 06:53

Space Whale: Nov 6, 2014

Luigi Thirty posted:

they tried using all of azure but find->replace on every racial slur would have taken until the heat death of the universe

holy necro reply but:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ5ppf0po3k

I've seen some incredible programming to stop people from using dirty words.
And I have seen it in the name of a talking banana.

# ? Oct 20, 2018 07:41

Space Whale: Nov 6, 2014

So I think my boss is too "paranoid of security" to let me do security audits
:q:

"Kali is DANGEROUS man!!!"

Yes I will literally launch loving skynet,

# ? Oct 20, 2018 07:42

Space Whale: Nov 6, 2014

I also somehow on my own frankenstein's monster'd a website together except it's two 'branches' that diverged some 2 years ago. And it's an ancient ASP.NET and jQuery as gently caress monster mash of a web app.

Fuckin Spooky.

Also it's going to become customer facing when it really wasn't before except in minimal ways and there's basically no manpower to do security audits or even get security requirements :psyduck:

Did I mention this is aviation related?

# ? Oct 20, 2018 07:43

HoboMan: Nov 4, 2010

i just want to loving make stuff, not spend literal days debugging my dang toolchain

# ? Oct 20, 2018 07:56

VikingofRock: Aug 24, 2008

So I generally think boost libraries (with some notable exceptions) are pretty usable, if a little over-engineered and quirky. But boost::filesystem in contrast seems really under-engineered and full of surprises. For example, I'm trying to write a function which copies a few directories recursively. It seems like the copy itself should be as simple as:

C++ code:

fs::copy(source, destination);

But that runs into this wild segfault. Okay though, that seems like it might be apple's fault, so we won't hold it against boost::filesystem. And there's a workaround:

C++ code:

fs::copy(source, destination, ec);
if (ec) {
    throw std::runtime_error(std::string("Error copying ")
    + source.native() + " to "
    + destination.native() + ": "
    + ec.message());
}

Except that doesn't do what you think it does. When copying directories (like source and destination), boost::filesystem doesn't actually recursively copy the directory (like you would expect), but instead just creates a new directory at the destination with the same attributes as the source directory.

...Fine, we can work around that again.

C++ code:

for (auto& entry: fs::recursive_directory_iterator(source)) {
    auto relative_dest = entry
        .path()
        .lexically_relative(source)
        .lexically_normal();
    auto absolute_dest = destination / relative_dest;
    fs::copy(entry.path(), absolute_dest, ec);
    if (ec) {
        throw std::runtime_error(std::string("Error copying ")
        + source.native() + " to "
        + destination.native() + ": "
        + ec.message());
    }
}

Why make such a simple function so complicated?

(and no, I can't use std::filesystem from c++17, since it's been an uphill struggle making sure that I can count on c++11 being present on all the machines I want to run this on)

# ? Oct 20, 2018 08:52

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Space Whale posted:

I also somehow on my own frankenstein's monster'd a website together except it's two 'branches' that diverged some 2 years ago. And it's an ancient ASP.NET and jQuery as gently caress monster mash of a web app.

Fuckin Spooky.

Also it's going to become customer facing when it really wasn't before except in minimal ways and there's basically no manpower to do security audits or even get security requirements

Did I mention this is aviation related?

high-five, garbage aviation-related software buddy

hopefully you'll get lucky and it'll take the customers a couple years to realize there's no security

# ? Oct 20, 2018 14:19

Phobeste: Apr 9, 2006; never, like, count out Touchdown Tom, man

VikingofRock posted:

(and no, I can't use std::filesystem from c++17, since it's been an uphill struggle making sure that I can count on c++11 being present on all the machines I want to run this on)

also i'm pretty sure cpp17 std::filesystem is just boost::filesystem

i think this behavior is kind of correct though? i guess my go to comparison is python: the copy operation (and unlink operation) are in os, but copying or removing trees are in shutil - and they have a couple different variants for surprising behavior like symlinks or attributes (or xattrs in the case of OSX). it's a filesystem library, not a shell library.

Phobeste fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Oct 20, 2018

# ? Oct 20, 2018 16:03

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# ? Apr 23, 2024 07:24

prisoner of waffles: May 8, 2007; Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the fishmech
About my neck was hung.

If a boost library could provide a "perfect granular control of everything" API but also a "common use cases, do what I mean" API, there's an abnormally good chance they'll leave the latter as an exercise for the library consumer

e: blah blah blah burden of trying to be header-only

# ? Oct 20, 2018 17:27

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