Colossal Boredom

I've been complaining even more frequently about how I'm a programmer that does little programming. This is partly because people have been bitching about my poor interviewing skills, and partly because I don't do much programming. Today I got a programming task. Now I kind of wish I didn't: my job is to wade into this mountain of disgusting perl and ruby code and make a change to all of the many places that involve this one database. This isn't the kind of programming I've been dreaming about. No one bothered standardizing this stuff, and, to my dismay, someone who programmed this dungheap liked reflection (or mixins, or whatever you want to call it). For those of you who don't know what reflection is, or do but know it by another name, reflection is how a programmer flashes the middle finger to someone reading their code later. Its like ripping the labels off soup cans, only far worse.

The next time you use any reflection-like features in your programming language, ask yourself if anyone is ever going to come along and read that code without the benefit of the documentation we both know you're not going to write. Now ask yourself if you hate that person. If the answer is yes, use reflection.

Anyway, that is why I am procrastinating. I've already wasted time on webcomics and stalking people on facebook; now I'm just resorting to whining about my job that actually isn't that bad. Its like 4:40pm. I've managed to open a file in vim.

I'm not even sure if this is perl or ruby code. Wait, it says perl at the top. Ok. I think I'm going to calculate how much work I could save if I could get away with deleting one of these scripts every time I get a task like this. The information would have little practical use, but summations are way for fun than other people's ruby code. This is like watching other people's home videos.