Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Compiling excuses


This is so true. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard this used as an excuse for lounging about and not doing very much in particular, in fact I've used it many times myself. It's a particularly useful tool when confronted with a clueless "non-technical" boss who thinks writing software is like filling cans of baked beans, i.e. the faster you do it the more product you'll end up with. Often it's not worth the effort trying to explain the technical as well as creative process that is programming to outsiders and "my code's compiling" sounds sufficiently technical to make them feel insecure and ward them off. It's also got the advantage that it can be said with complete confidence since there is a small grain of truth in it too, however these days with massively powerful build-servers and scripting products "compiling" seldom takes more than a few minutes, de-bugging on the other hand...

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