Gumby

Well shit, I’ve never seen AoC before - I’m not usually very interested in programming just for fun, but I might give that a try!

It seems that AI really is good for some things after all

I agree with your main point, although I think your example of COBOL being used to this day in financial institutions is actually the opposite problem. The guys that originally developed that shit were damn good programmers, but they were severely constrained by the available hardware, limitations of the language, etc. So they had to get really clever in order to make these massive, complicated systems work. In my experience, those really old legacy systems tend to be rock solid with near 100% uptime and almost no errors. They’ve never been rewritten because doing so would be a multi-year effort costing millions of dollars, and the end result would be a system that is most likely slower, buggier, and has less functionality.

TLDR: The old COBOL systems are unmaintainable messes not because of incompetent developers, but because the limitations of the available technology when they were originally developed forced a bunch of really good devs to have to get extremely creative and hacky with their solutions.

Holy shit, have we worked with the same guy?

Don’t

It’s fine, you only ever need to replace it like once a decade or so

“Clearly” is also subjective. What might be perfectly clear to me reading my own code may be really confusing to someone else, and vice versa. Especially if the person reading the code isn’t as familiar with the language as the person who wrote it, or if the code is using some syntactic sugar that isn’t super common, or plenty of other reasons.

I wish my brain worked half as well as guys like that.

Yes. And also comments :-)

siomehing

Perhaps you can link to some of those reputable sources and governments then?

Timberborn, Factorio, and XCOM 2

I’ll get right on that, as soon as I wrap up these 3 defects

Hi it’s me, your colleague