15 thoughts on “More Good News On Obama’s Legacy”

  1. Obama is starting to remind me of some of the programmers my old boss used to hire. They’d work for six month to a year. Normal maintenance of the code would end up removing all traces that they’d ever worked for us.

    Obama… the footnote president.

    2. Those are the sorts of programmers who’ve also never had to maintain other people’s code, and so never learned what it was like to have to deal with making minor changes to the “write-once” stuff they produced, or how to fix code without making it worse.

      Again, the Community-Organizer-in-Chief never spent enough time in His jobs to have to clean up His own messes, or other people’s messes. Hence the reliance over the next few months of “it’s Bush’s fault” as the all-purpose excuse, because anything else is an admission of His own failure(s).

    3. You have a maintenance process that is able to remove dead code?

      Yes, I have read “Anti-Patterns” cover-to-cover when it came out, but I am curious as to your development/maintenance processes that facilitate this. There is this strong Anti-Pattern tendency to leave code you remove as comments cluttering up the source in case it “did something the test didn’t catch” or “we may decide later we need that feature.”

      1. A good version control system is helpful there. The old code still exists in archive in case.

        1. That’s correct. When you have over a million lines of code (and you can only do this with a good editor) you really have to have version control.

          Regular maintenance, which is initiated by user complaints, tends to go right to the bad code of short time programmers so it’s eliminated rather quickly. Usually in less time than they took putting it in. Bad coders generally don’t know how to encapsulate their work producing classic spaghetti code. Back in the 70s I had a boss that wrote self modifying spaghetti code (limited memory ya know.) That was always fun to fix. Not just no version control. Remote editing with no user interface. Fun times.

          It’s very rare you actually need to look at older versions of code. But when you do it can be handy.

          ‘test case comments you leave in the code. Bad programmers tend not to put them in, in the first place. They don’t have a clue about testing. Shell Oil had a whole s/w testing department and you wouldn’t believe how much they missed.

    4. I understand that the most common diagnostic message for Windows 7 errors is “It’s Windows Vista’s fault…”

      1. I get a kick out of the hundreds if not thousands of mnemonics Microsoft uses to code true/false, yes/no. It’s like somebody wrote them a style book they all slavishly adhere to.

        …and always test against false which is universally zero. True might be anything. Especially when dealing with different SQL database products.

  2. I certainly hope this is just the start of a 5 month extravaganza of lawsuits, contempt hearings, rejections by the SCOTUS, exposes and just all around piling on of the Obama administration.

    2. Well, the debt ceiling will need to be raised again in October so at least Obama has that going for him.

  3. One thing that Obama supporters should be asking themselves is why are these laws so overbearing? What justification can support the isolation of this consumer protection bureau from both the legislative and executive branches? Why did health care “reform” force us to participate? The primary products of this administration are as undemocratic as anything produced in previous eras.

    1. Um, to protect them from Ralph Nader’s people?

      Seriously, people, there is a link over at Hot Air, I believe, that proclaims that HSR in California is now dead. The deal is that Governor Brown caved to the environmental lobby and backed off his bill in the Legislature to exempt the CA HSR from strict environmental scrutiny.

      The reasoning is there are already enviro/NIMBY lawsuits, i.e. the Nader legacy of using lawsuits to “protect the little guy” over the rail line, and none of this will get straightened out before the December 2012 deadline the US DOT put on getting those at-the-ready shovels going with the 2.5 billion in Federal stimulus money for the CA HSR.

      The site also gloats about the green-on-green fratricide, that an enviro project (electric high-speed trains) is getting blocked by green lawsuits. But there you have it.

  4. Readers will recall that Cordray received a recess appointment at a time when the Senate was not in recess, as clearly it must be for such an appointment to be valid. The plaintiffs contend that the Senate was not in recess because (1) it had declared itself to be in session, (2) the House had not consented to a Senate adjournment of longer than three days, as it must, and (3) the Senate passed significant economic legislation during the session in which the president claimed it was in recess.

    This should be a litmus test. Any judge who gets this case and rules against the plantiff on this point ought to face impeachment.

  5. Another part of the Obama/programmer analogy is that bad programmers tend to break other peoples code by changing a routine that others depend on rather than creating a new routine with a different name. It’s ok to use the same name with different parameters (but I generally don’t like that either when I see it.)

    Euphoria programmers are terrible that way. It’s a great language that simplifies many algorithms but will forever remain a toy language because the people maintaining it are academics with no clue about how the real world works. Really smart people… which is a real shame.

    Hmmm… an academic that has no clue about how the real world works… that reminds me of someone?

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