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.

  1. They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.

  2. 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.

  3. This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.

  4. 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.

  • vrek@programming.devOPEnglish
    2·
    1 hour ago

    I worked on a laser seam welder which basically was programmed in a mix of g code and I guess vb??

    The fun part was variables could only be numbers between 100 to 999. So let’s say you have a sensor and need to verify it’s within a certain range. You could set #525 to 10 and #526 to 20 then say #527 = sensor 1 signal. Now lower down you verify it as if(#525 > #527 || #526 < #527){show error}

    Now you could create each variable at the beginning with comment of what it was but then have to keep referring to the top to remind yourself what number was what. Or create the variable at first use so it was closer but now it’s spread across the document.

    I went with first case and just printed out the first 2 pages which listed all the variables.

    Before you ask, I talked to the guy who wrote the language and made the system many times he confirmed you couldn’t use variable names.