Oww my head. I can never tell if people like this are serious or just trying to have a good laugh.

I have this bizarre creepy feeling that this might actually be the logical extensions of some strange thought process involving agile programming.

I just can’t be sure. Maybe if they provided saner code, I could tell if they were joking or actually suggesting that every program should have the complexity of hello world.

Opinions anyone?

This is just silliness run amok. Same jokers believe that hard typing is wrong and shouldn’t be allowed I am sure. Never mind it is efficient and easy to understand thus simpler to maintain. Would not surprise me if these jokers are the same ones that think SQL normalization should be taken to the extremes.

*laugh* Funny stuff! Parody sites that poke fun at software engineering principles gone overboard are always fun. 🙂

Don’t forget about “for” loops.

They’re so last century:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/311165/how-do-you-convert-byte-array-to-hexadecimal-string-and-vice-versa-in-c/311382#311382

🙂

Wouter : Funny you should mention For loops. That’s how I came across this in the first place http://weblogs.asp.net/podwysocki/archive/2009/06/26/the-anti-for-campaign.aspx

Mason and Xepol : I suspect it is a joke (or maybe pray is a better word than suspect). Given the Agile connection, it doesn’t seem to gel very well with YAGNI.

One If is fine maybe even two, but fifteen+ if else if’s becomes hilarious and prone to bugs.

And I’ve seen it and replaced it with more sane but still not great constructs.

I too think it’s probably a joke, or at least tongue firmly in cheek, directed at those who would rather keep learning (or sell us) new ways to do the same old stuff than get good at doing “The Stuff” itself (as “Agile” itself is in many ways).

And yet some how, inspite of the reassurances, there is that nagging doubt that chills my heart and twists my reality. After all, I considered the whole Agile programming thing a bizarre joke of some sort originally (In fact, I still strongly believe that!)

I’m resisting the urge to break into fits of “but how do you know man, HOW DO YOU KNOW?!?!”

Ah nutz, see, there I went and did it anyways.

Mark my words, one day the original people behind agile programming will try to admit it was all a big joke – but it will have grown too large with too much money invested -no one will believe them and we’ll all have to have our thetan levels measured before we can code each day…

It doesn’t strike me as a joke: Code that’s litter with “IF object IS TWidget THEN…”, is a bad “code smell”, in my opinion.

Sure, Roddy, but equally, replacing all of those IF’s with polymorphism doesn’t strike me as great smelling code either. Either extreme stinks.

@Malcolm –

If you’re testing the object type, you’ve already GOT polymorphism. You’re just not using virtual methods to make it work for you.

However, I guess it opens up the question of whether a bad OO design is worse than a bad non-OO design…

In that specific use case, maybe, but they don’t seem to be proposing that we do away with them sometimes.