[0675] Mediation
└ posted on Thursday, 16 April 2015, by Novil
- HR lady: The first step in mediation is the exchange of your feelings in a non-judgmental environment. Richard, you may go first.
- Richard: Melody’s code makes me nauseated. It’s so ugly, the Free Software Foundation forbade making it open source.
- Melody: Oooohh, is weepy widdle Richard angry because his crummy piece of code is 57% slower than mine?!
- HR lady: In step two, the mediator chugs a bottle of vodka.
- Richard: Her code also has so many security holes, the Adobe Flash team has been called in to make it more secure.
Yep, still totally lost. But man programing sounds so petty glad I went with journalism for my major.
I have to side with Richard on this one. Performance is a target of opportunity, not a major goal; maintainability (of which a uniform project indentation style is one aspect) is right up there with correctness, and may in fact be even more important than correctness. “Well, if it doesn’t have to work, we can make it go really fast.” “If we can’t fix it, then it isn’t broken.”
@ gamerjoel135:
they do have a room its the one they are in just they have a middle person with them.
All right, Melody is just being a giant jerk. Richard never insulted HER with immature playground insults. Where’d the axe go?
*ahem* FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT (kiss kiss kiss)!!!
I’m also with Richard on this one. The majority of time spent on code is not in its design or in its original development, but in its maintenance. If other developers can’t understand your code six months from now without asking you about it, you’ve failed. Clarity is essential, and that includes following coding standards.
Melody resorts to mocking Richard, calling hims “weepy” and “widdle”, using a silly voice, making crying gestures, and invading his personal space. None of this behaviour has any bearing on the quality of his code.
Two adult professionals who have both studied logic should be able to discuss the issue calmly and rationally. But then it wouldn’t be funny. 🙂
Well, aside the programming points, the whole problem is with Melody to begin. In each comic Melody become negative, agressive or show some kind of divergence with Richard. Richard stands in a neutral point, and only later reacts.
Messing with the source without permission make Melody more responsible of the problem. In a team, everyone have to respect limits and the chain of command. If a new employer mess without permission the code, more for a personal vedetta, Melody lose the right to point out yours reasons.
Is not only about how to code, but how you handle with your co-workers…
Wow…. Just look at the Mediator at Panel 3 😀
FINISH HER!@ The Chad:
@ Passing Breeze:
I mean 4th Panel ((Jesus, im an idiot and talkative))
@ Melkior:
This was far more true in the past than now. Modern compilers write highly efficient code.
okay, that was just rude, RIchard….
…..now kiss kiss fall in loooooove
Where did she get the bottle of vodka?
@ Sean Lang:
No, it just needs to be free of charge. “free” does not mean “you can do whatever you want”.
@ Taolan:
Hah, yeah, you don’t screw with a programmer’s indenting. Actually the #1 thing that drives me insane when working with, say, Doom, and using actors made by other people- if you were to look at all my DECORATE files, you’ll notice that literally any code block I’ve edited even SLIGHTLY has been indented in the style I use. Every. Single. Block.
(people like to use either single spaces for indents or just not indent at all, and that drives me insane)
I’ll just leave this here….
https://youtu.be/25QyCxVkXwQ
I was with the girl on indent style. Richard’s code was awful to look at. But this…?
It’s good to see Richard can dish it out as well as take it.
Congratulations on the correct English usage: “Melody’s code makes me nauseated.” (The code itself is nauseous.)
… Why am I suddenly shipping Melody and Richard?
Ooooh, ouch. I felt that burn from here.
… Clearly, this mediator needed more training before she tried to work out in the real world. =_=
It’s … something … to see that even IT-specialists bicker like they never left elementary from time to time.
Flash? That’s really low, Richard.
I know exactly where this is headed.
They are so going to hook up. ;3
Want to read weird code? Look up Duff’s device. Multi-threading in a single C thread by horribly mangling the language.
The more confident people get that those two are going to hook up, the more I’m doubting it.
Anyway, the third panel is one of the best panels I’ve seen. Both body language and facial expressions of all three of them are hilariously and masterfully done.
Sean Lang wrote:
Actually, just because Software is Free to Use does NOT mean that you get to play with it and redistribute it.
The Original Author still Owns it and has the right to tell you that Using It is fine, Re-issuing it is NOT.
As there seems to be a bit of confusion, “free software” is a set phrase and is “[n]ot to be confused with Freeware software, software with no monetary cost.” An important distinction sometimes described as “Free as in freedom”.
To truly understand just how Bad (even if it does produce Awesome Results) software can be, take a look at the Obfuscated C Code Contest.
For those unfamiliar with it the First Rule is that, if anyone can tell what the code Does by Reading it, the entry is Disqualified.
http://www.ioccc.org/winners.html
The second rule is that it has to do Something Useful as defined by that year’s “objectives” for the contest.
You submit your entry, they compile it, execute it and decide if they Like what you’ve accomplished.
Some examples from the past:
1986 marshall train engine-shaped program prints “choo choo”
1986 pawka prints ‘obfuscated?’ big, uses xyyyx idents…
1987 westley individually palindromic lines prints a palindrome
1988 phillipps ‘first day of christmas’, tables, heavily main() calling
1989 roemer prints e, script-pi shaped layout, _31415 identifiers
1990 westley poetic exchange between lovers, prints “luvs me, luvs not”
1992 lush prints “Hello, World” using error messages
1995 dodsond1 Text to “Pig Latin” translator
1995 schnitzi Find divisors: where a core dump is a feature, not a bug
1996 schweikh1 Calculates Easter dates from 1582 to 2199 AD
NOW KISS!!
At that point the table, bearing various loads, spilt coffee, sleeping people, and now a whole Person had had Enough and Snapped.
Uuuu flashburn…
Oh, they are SO hot for each other.
@ Paeris Kiran:
What, has it been a week already?!
“In step two, the mediator chugs a bottle of vodka.”
Okay, Lightning Farron is the LAST person who should be taking the role of mediator.
Richard won the trash-talking competition with his second comment.
So how many strips before these two have a kid?
Well, this is going to end violently.
Curses! I have ow read the entire Sandra andSooarchives, and I have to WAIT for the next strip to appear.
On the bright side, I might get some useful work done now. 🙂
@ Saskfan:
been there, done that….amazing how much of your life it can swallow in short order isn’t it?
gamerjoel135 wrote:
You said it all brother.
“And that is the story of how Sandra got two new stepmommies. The End.
Rock wrote:
No. I’m pretty sure she’s had lots of training… Beginners don’t bring their own liquor.
Mediating between ITs, or engineers, is essentially the ability to listen to arguments made by people devoid of people skills.
“the Adobe flash team has been called in to make it more secure” hahahahahahahahaha….
Burned! lolololololololol…..
I incidentally recently uninstalled flash and make due with html5 for youtube.
(I swear flash causes a good deal of my BSODs and probably most of the virus threats)
when windows 10 arives i am going to run a virtualized copy and my regular windows ana do all my browzing and virus scaning on the sand boxed version and run a stable virus software free (or maybe security essentials only) main windows for all my secure gaming and software..
flash will be safely sand boxed away where it can do limited harm
@ Sir_England:
In Soviet Russia, vodka chugs you.
@ Jerry:
I liked the code in the shape of a sailing ship that printed Tengwar script in the style Sauron used for the One Ring.
Wow, okay, I thought they were about evenly matched before, but security vulnerabilities are way more important than 57% speed. In most applications, you wouldn’t even notice that speed difference.
Riiiight, because we all know how safe Adobe Flash is XD Good one!
@ Garnasha:
Outperforming the Java Standard Library by a good margin is no mean feat. We did that as an exercise for our very first lecture in practical informatics, and quite a few students got more than an order of magnitude for the whole task. Just replacing trivial wrappers like Int with primitive types is a huge optimization by itself (it gets rid of significant amounts of superfluous constructors, initializations, internal references and destructors that any half-decent C++ compiler would just optimize away, like it does for most STL containers if you watch your usage a little). And once you start with deep optimization like bit-fiddling an array of bools or chars into integers to vectorize your operations, there is just no contest any more.
But trying to optimize Java programs shows a severe misunderstanding of what Java is meant for (or quite a bit of masochism).
@ Henix:
Yup, I completely side with Linus Torvalds on indentation. Use full tabs of eight spaces.
If this causes you trouble with reading the end of your lines, you nested too deeply and need to refactor into smaller functions. Don’t worry – with any not completely brain-dead compiler, function calls within the same translation unit are usually free if you declare your parameters correctly (const & FTW).
próximamente:
Richard: Sandra te presento la amiga especial de tu papa. 😉
Sandra: !?
Woo: Humanos y su temporada de apareamiento
I just looked at the first comic and only just now realised how much the characters have actually grown first they were kids and now teens-young adults funny for some reason I didn’t notice before
Rasimpson wrote:
Speaking from Personal Experience, I’ve had to Locate and Fix speed problems in software where the 57% difference was ONE Second.
Yep. Not only did people Notice and Complain about the One Second delay, when I fixed it, the company’s Profits Soared. People were actually Not Using the application because of the perception that 2 seconds was Too Long to Wait for a reply.