Around 2 years ago, I got an email from a products team asking me for urgent help extending a program in time to make a sale.
I looked over the program and wrote back sonething along the lines of “this program was written almost a decade ago by an unsupervisered highschool intern. Why TF are we still using it?”.
Of course, I ended up helping them, because that highschool intern was me, and I ended up helping because no one else could figure out what highschool me was thinking.
I sometimes wonder if the spaghetti i wrote when i was still learning to program (on my own, in the corner of the room, ignored by all the “real” devs) is still used by the team i wrote it for.
Not a bug exactly, but about ten years ago I was working as an iOS developer and to get around a major problem introduced by the app designer, I made use of a “private method”, which is something an app supposedly gets rejected for by Apple. I came up with a way of hiding it and had to sweat out the approval period before it went live. Ten years later that shit is still there; I’m sure the developers currently responsible for the app don’t even know it’s there. I normally comment my code with an eye to helping future programmers understand what’s going on and why, but this hack was one where I even obscured the comments.
Objective-C does not enforce method access (e.g. private methods) at the runtime level. If you are sufficiently determined, there are no restrictions on what methods you can call, unlike Java or C# (AFAIK).
Java absolutely lets you do that with Reflections. You’re not supposed to, and it’s painfully slow, but the JVM is only marginally smarter than javac (and that’s saying something) so there’s nothing actually stopping you.
I thought there was security code to stop that kind of thing. Granted, it’s been over 10 years since I’ve done anything with Java more than tinkering with Minecraft mods.
Java did have a Security Manager that can be used to prevent this sort of thing. The original thinking was that the Java runtime would essentially be an OS, and you could have different applets running within the runtime. This required a permission system where you could confine the permissions of parts of a Java program without confining the entire thing; which led to the Java security manager.
Having said that, the Java Security Manager, while an interesting idea, has never been good. The only place it has ever seen significant use was in webapps, where it earned Java the reputation for being insecure. Nowadays, Java webapps are ancient history due to the success of Javascript.
The security manager was depreciated in Java 17, and I believe removed entirely in Java 21.
Been in mine 25 years. I could probably make more money elsewhere, but then I’d have to get a proper job rather than be the coding equivalent of an unmaintained fire extinguisher.
oh i just meant because usually tech companies go bust or merge in under five years these days :3 but that’s honestly so amazing and i’m happy that you are that happy where you are!
My colleague and “squad leader” (ie boss without the salary) is a few months younger than me and has been in the same company for about 18 years. Meanwhile I think the longest I’ve been somewhere is about 2 years.
“Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” has me giggling every time.
Ive moved jobs 4 times in the last 10 years and only 1 of those jobs has actually moved me off the projects I’ve been working on.
I’ve legitimately responded to my own Issue with a fix to the bug I put in against that code that I wrote at a previous place. It’s weird.
I almost always get another set of eyes since it’s my old code but that’s always fun “hey I wrote this 6 years ago and it still works but it’s gross … please don’t judge me”
Ha, you remember 15 year old bugs? I’ve “fixed” bugs that were deliberate decisions because the fix was worse then the bug - so I’ve then unfixed the bug and said “7 years ago xmunk, that was really quite a good decision… SO Y U NO COMMENT!” Of course, since I’ve fixed the same fix twice it’s now burned into my memory so there’s no reason to leave a comment at this point.
There’s been a few times where I had to look into an issue and found a comment I wrote much earlier with a ticket number or link to a previous ticket that explains exactly why this new issue is actually the intended behavior.
It’s really helpful when the product owners clearly can’t make up their minds about what they want their apps to do.
I love living vicariously. I feel this whole situation, and I barely ever did more then the (bare bones) intro to AMOS, or or hello world on c64 basic, but Lemmy and the hard R site (before the API mess) memes make me feel the situations at hand, even with very minimal understanding of coding.
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