Windows 1.0.

Any questions?

If ONLY the tool was "Internet Explorer"... sigh...

I think you're overgeneralizing. Not all IDEs separate the code in menus and popdown lists. Unfortunately, some of Microsoft's tools don't give you access to the full source code and it's a royal pain in the ass to refactor code.

This is the problem that perhaps the article is talking about: When the source code is tied to the IDE, everything becomes impossible to maintain.

Perhaps not reloading Windows, but pretty close: Try installing SQL Server 2005 one of these days. The .NET framework 2.0 conflicts with .NET 3.51, .NET 2.01 and refuses to install. You need to uninstall ALL your current versions of .NET, install SQL Server 2005, reinstall them and pray that everything goes fine.

Recently I've joined a gigantic project involving Classic ASP and SQL Server.

Te lead developer only knows to program using Dreamweaver.

When I looked at the code, this is what I saw:

• Tons of replicated files using dreamweaver templates.
• All the javascript for more than 400 asp files (I'm not kidding!) is stored in only three different .js files.
• All the asp files are in the same friggin' directory.
• The javascript validations included which file to submit the form to (yes, they changed the action attribute!)
• No sign of OOP or even modular programming.
• The code for validating roman numerals using regexps used a different regexp like "([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])" for length-1 strings, "([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])" for length-2, "([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])([X]|[I]|[V]|[L]|[C]|[D]|[M])" for length 3, and so on. The whole code took over 30 lines of javascript code
• Javascript comments in the .js files started with <!-- and SOMETIMES closed with --> (other times they're not closed at all! Imagine my dismay when the app broke after I searched-replaced them with decent /* and */ comments.

I tried to make an automated dependency table on their giant blob monster attempt of a project by using grep and a graph-visualizing tool, but there were dozens of orphan files and isolated clusters which lead to absolutely nowhere (it was by analyzing them by hand that I realized lots of validation functions were in one same javascript file).

When I asked the lead developer why he stored all the javascript in a single file instead of putting it in the same asps (they were all spaghetti anyway. It would've been much better to not mix them up with the .js files) he almost called me an idiot for not being able to "click" on the button on dreamweaver, read the function name, open the javascript and pressing ctrl-f for searching the function.

The only reason I didn't lecture him on multi-tier programming and advanced grep tools was because he's the manager's star developer, and since the company hired our company for consulting, they're still above us in hierarchy and these matters need to be handled with tweezers. Had I been hired before, I'd have recommended my boss to ask twice the money.

Anyway - If you want my opinion on automated GUI tools (at least for web projects), they only procreate idiots and promote short-term productivity. Of course, when something breaks, it won't be the idiot's fault. It'll be the guy in turn who happened to write perfectly-well-designed code that somehow triggered a hidden bug in the sacred-cow spaghetti code.

BTW, if you want to know the idiot's name, his name is Josh. I won't mention his surname to protect the "innocent" (rofl), but at least his name will be preserved for posterity :)

Whoever said Sci-Fi ran out of steam should watch all the Ghost in the Shell movies and series. I've never seen a series address technology ethics in such an elaborate way.

Times are changing. Science fiction should just adapt with the current trends and start from it. What dangers await society? What opportunities? In the cyberpunk era, we didn't even imagine open source gaining power. What about SPAM? What about the degeneration of society? What about the growth of social networking? What about the fight between freedom of speech and the copyright police? (We've read 1984, but where are the media companies?)

As you can see, there's a lot of material to work on. It only takes some imagination and connecting the dots.

(sighs) Only in America...

of agile software development.

http://www.softwarereality.com/lifecycle/xp/case_against_xp.jsp

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html

Speak for yourself. I do believe you can't steal music.

You could steal the original copies. You could steal a famous painting. But "stealing" music? For instance, what IS music? It's nothing but a mathematical concept involving harmonics and sound.

What are words? You can't "steal" what I said. This isn't like the little mermaid where you could steal someone's voice and leave him/her mute.

Non-physical works CANNOT be stolen. Unless you're talking about a PHYSICAL COPY, you cannot steal it by definition. Copying a work? That's completely different. But if it's a non-destructive process, you're not stealing it. You're just COPYING it.

If you want to use an appropriate term for what Microsoft supposedly did with this GPL code, it's called plagiarism. Sure, it's called "stealing" nowadays, but using this word is oversimplifying.

Bill Gates' open letter to hobbyists. Any questions?