note carefully i mentioned nothing of this by name for obvious reasons. if you’re interested, drop me a line and i’ll indulge you.
i code in scheme. it’s not real scheme. it’s some guy’s idea of what scheme should be. he redefined the syntax. it gets interpreted through mzscheme embedded in a c program. well, it’s not a exactly a c program. it becomes a c program. the original software was written in a language he invented. more like a preprocessor for c. it was his idea of what c++ should be.
where i work now, we have a guy that calls himself the gatekeeper. that’s right, zuul. his job is not to guard gozer, but to basically preform the role of a piece of software you might have heard of somewhere called cvs (and its replacement, subversion). man is smarter than the machine, right? especially at merging different versions of scheme code. especially when you don’t know scheme. it makes you more careful because you don’t know what you’re doing – you do it right because you incorporate the changes just as they appear.
in fact, i lied. he’s not where i work. he’s in a different company. through some bizarre legalese, this company possesses the QA and the production server, and will not allow us to have write access into that machine.
why we don’t have write access to the source directories of the product that our company is using is beyond me. initially, this was because we both used the same product and the same source. now, they have their own version and we have ours. but they still control that server.
you would think we could buy a server and put our version on there. considering the cost of having a server versus the cost of fixing scheme code that somehow manages to get mauled everytime it goes by zuul, you would think this issue would have been cleared up quickly.
it’s been going on for four years.
guys, we’re just janitors. we know everything that goes on, what’s wrong in the world, but all we do is mop up shit after hours.
the life of a programmer. keep your head up and don’t smell.
Manual version control is insane.
Your company should get their own source control server if you need to make changes (or be allowed write permissions to a branch at least).
V’s company had a similar issue with a proprietary language / platform, I think.
You manage to find the crackpot programmer-managers.
Graham
We had a problem with a toy language, but I’m almost done replacing it. Fortunately, it wasn’t used at the fundamental level that { } was having problems with. Most of the time it was delt with by simply not using it.
Why is it that companies are founded by nutters? If I succeed in starting a company, will I become one as well?