I don’t think this is legit because even as I was reading it, I was expecting it to sound a lot worse than it ended up sounding. Like, it didn’t sound great or anything, but it didn’t sound nearly as fucked up as I would expect firsthand descriptions of piled-on legacy code to sound after almost 50 fucking years.
Sounds like classic junior engineer shit. “Let’s do a big rewrite!” Followed by everything going to shit because they don’t how to create good maintainable software architecture and for whatever reason there weren’t enough senior engineers around to show them the way.
Seriously, it doesn’t sound great, but it sounds about what you might expect wiring up a new UI widget in WPF or whatever the latest thing for native Windows is. Sounds like what would happen if you started developing a Windows app using the Microsoft scaffolding and never applied any kind of software architecture beyond that and it just grew and grew into a big ball of mud. Exactly what I would expect given the quality of so many of their frameworks, and I say that as a professional dotnet software engineer.
True, that is surprising and makes everything worse. It’s probably controlled by a setting that none of those engineers knows how to change, based on the lack of knowledge described here.
My guess is that a stack trace is being generated, but something further down the chain is consuming it, realizes there’s an error, and just throws -1 instead of the stack trace itself.
I don’t think this is legit because even as I was reading it, I was expecting it to sound a lot worse than it ended up sounding. Like, it didn’t sound great or anything, but it didn’t sound nearly as fucked up as I would expect firsthand descriptions of piled-on legacy code to sound after almost 50 fucking years.
But did you read the last line? This isn’t classic control panel, this is the new control panel.
Sounds like classic junior engineer shit. “Let’s do a big rewrite!” Followed by everything going to shit because they don’t how to create good maintainable software architecture and for whatever reason there weren’t enough senior engineers around to show them the way.
Seriously, it doesn’t sound great, but it sounds about what you might expect wiring up a new UI widget in WPF or whatever the latest thing for native Windows is. Sounds like what would happen if you started developing a Windows app using the Microsoft scaffolding and never applied any kind of software architecture beyond that and it just grew and grew into a big ball of mud. Exactly what I would expect given the quality of so many of their frameworks, and I say that as a professional dotnet software engineer.
The complete lack of error reporting in the compiler is a surprise though.
True, that is surprising and makes everything worse. It’s probably controlled by a setting that none of those engineers knows how to change, based on the lack of knowledge described here.
My guess is that a stack trace is being generated, but something further down the chain is consuming it, realizes there’s an error, and just throws -1 instead of the stack trace itself.
Something like