I'll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.

They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.
The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.
This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.
Here's my favorite part. You obviously don't want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you're thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.

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[–] Xerxos@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Here is my story:

There were console outputs after nearly every line. I asked about them: "Oh, I couldn't get the debugger to work, so I print everything to the console"

This was everywhere. The whole program was like this. On a standard Linux machine. It wasn't even remote debugging or something. Just a local C++ program.

The filenames where written in 8+3. Again, on a modern Linux machine. His answer? "You never know where we'll port this software to"

Onto computers that were outdated decades ago? To embedded systems? Of course he had no answer for this except "just in case..."

I could tell you more, that software was the stuff for nightmares.

[–] mr_satan@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

Of course he had no answer for this except "just in case..."

Never in my career have I seen this argument come to fruition as valid.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Was he trying to use a ide or like vim/clang/gdb for debugging before giving up?

[–] Xerxos@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

He didn't use an IDE, but I don't remember what he tried. He also wasn't a fan of googling stuff. Use the man pages and nothing else.