r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Link9454 • 22h ago

Meme iWorkHarderNotSmarter

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226 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

23

u/coriolis7 21h ago

Not exactly the same, since I already knew the existing language.

We have a collection of Matlab scripts and function files that take in a bunch of csv files. It presents some statistics on the data in those files, and the user has to find the outliers and do some other analysis, then manually exclude files.

It’s like 100 individual .m files to do this. I got frustrated trying to learn all the interconnections between scripts and function files, and the person showing me how to use them was just about as frustrated with the state of the code.

He’s signed off on me rewriting the whole thing in Python.

3

u/jarethholt 16h ago

Based on Matlab plus your username, are you perchance in one of the geosciences? My degree is in climate physics and had my share of needing to deal with colleagues' Matlab files/code

2

u/coriolis7 16h ago

Username is completely unrelated. I had no idea what my username should be when I started gaming in college. Was taking Statics & Dynamics (Mechanical Engineering) and the term was fresh in my mind, so I rolled with it.

Funnily enough, I now deal with Coriolis meters on a daily basis for work.

The matlab scripts are for characterization of flow measurement devices using a Coriolis meter as the “reference”. All the nonlinearities, temperature effects, and device-to-device differences are all modeled with the matlab scripts so we know how to calibrate future devices in production.

12

u/MySickDadDied 21h ago

rewriting it gives me the illusion of control

1

u/AyrA_ch 3h ago

For me, rewriting stuff is the best way of understanding it and improving it at the same time.

7

u/Link9454 21h ago

This Python script ran a bunch of commands to install a precompiled Linux OS on an embedded SOM, but it constantly missed interrupts and result strings. I rebuilt it using Tera Terms macro script so that Tera Term handles all the serial minutia and timing and all that. The Python script was a past engineers early attempt that was deemed “good enough”, but it was like 1000 lines, by contrast my TTL script is 400 and change and still needs some refactoring.

4

u/brimston3- 15h ago

Now make the rewrite pass the compliance test suite the old script passed.

2

u/Link9454 14h ago

I’ll eat my hat if the old one passed any compliance any-damn-thing. Based on the developers notes in the script, it was very much an early test version.

3

u/elmanoucko 18h ago

Bug free ? How are you supposed to make money then ? Feels like a dumb business model.

1

u/Link9454 16h ago edited 12h ago

In all seriousness, it’s for a production environment I work at, it sets up and tests a Linux embedded system. So it needs to be relatively automated and run a few hundred times a day. Like 20 distinct commands to send, wait for it to finish, log result. Over and over again. Luckily I am really familiar with state machine programming.

1

u/elmanoucko 2h ago

Still doesn't tell me how you'll make money without bugs. Do you really want to end like IBM ?