Iterative vs. Recursive coding

[John Bokma]

Bruno Desthuilliers <bruno.42.desthuilliers at websiteburo.invalid> writes:

> BartC a écrit :
>> "Steven D'Aprano" <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> wrote in
>> message news:4c6f8edd$0$28653$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com...
>>> On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:23:23 +0200, Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
>>
>>>> I onced worked in a shop (Win32 desktop / accouting applications mainly)
>>>> where I was the only guy that could actually understand recursion. FWIW,
>>>> I also was the only guy around that understood "hairy" (lol) concepts
>>>> like callback functions, FSM, polymorphism, hashtables, linked lists,
>>>> ADTs, algorithm complexity etc...
>>>
>>>
>>> Was there anything they *did* understand, or did they just bang on the
>>> keyboard at random until the code compiled? *wink*
>>
>> You underestimate how much programming (of applications) can be done
>> without needing any of this stuff.
>
> From personal experience : almost nothing worth being maintained. I'm
> talking about complex domain-specific applications here - not shell
> scripts or todo-lists.

I doubt anyone who codes like that keeps a todo-list.

>>>> Needless to say, I didn't last long !-)
>>>
>>> And rightly so :)
>>
>> I guess they wanted code that could be maintained by anybody.
>
> The code base was an unmaintainable, undecipĥerable mess loaded with
> global state (litteraly *hundreds* of global variables), duplication,
> dead code, and enough WTF to supply thedailywtf.com for years - to
> make a long story short, the perfect BigBallOfMudd. FWIW, the company
> didn't last long neither - they just kept on introducing ten new bugs
> each time they "fixed" one.

and they forgot to sell that as new features, I guess :-D.

-- 
John Bokma                                                               j3b

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