Time for that follow-up post; but first, let’s take a look at something deeply disturbing.

Like me, the author is having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever.

Why can’t programmers… program?

Maybe 2 years ago - fresh from my degree - I would’ve thought that perhaps half of people claiming to be able to program would be bullshitting, or at least vastly exaggerating their skills. *cough* Nowadays, after spending my time with various people and companies, helping out, working, I think I can quite strongly agree that there is a large group of very deluded people out there.

Programming isn’t some trivial task that anyone can do, neither is it rocket science (ok, bad analogy), but it is a skill like any other. Some people can do it, some people can’t - some people are insanely good at the little details, some people are great at seeing the bigger picture. Some people should not be left in charge of a computer system. Ever.

I might not be a great programmer, but I’m consistent and thorough - thorough, to me, doesn’t mean releasing 0-bug code though; I am strongly of the opinion that the end-user must test and report back bugs or mis-labeled features. Doing so requires a cooling-period, there should always be a period of time where things are tested and reviewed. Yet, time and time again people I have worked with have scrapped production code for basically new untested code. Why on earth would this ever be a good idea.

Anyway, reporting back on fresh travesties of code and assaults on common sense:

Apparently a Javascript script running on a user’s PC (Javascript is NOT Java by the way) can cause a CPU load spike on the web server that is serving the content. So, a script that doesn’t communicate with the server (no AJAX), a script that runs in a sandbox, in a browser, on a PC miles away from the server, is responsible for a 328 load on a single CPU box. For those of you not in the web development field, the mere statement that Javascript is capable of running server-side is akin to me telling a car mechanic that the puncture in my front left tyre is making my back right tyre deflate. Back in the real world, the obscene load was caused by some circular requires (no use for require_once here, thanks).

Similarly, back in outer space, MySQL is now able to store multi-byte data in single-byte data columns. Even kanji, of which there are around 10 000, can be stored in a column with a 255 character space. 7Zip move over, we have a new compression contender. Additionally, for those of you who thought that internationalising your project was going to be a huge hassle, it now seems that the quickest and easiest way to add UTF8 support is to open each source file and go to your IDE’s File menu, and then change the file encoding to ‘UTF8′. It really is that easy.

I’d continue, but I actually feel bad for what I’ve written already. I think further illustration of what is painfully obvious is unnecessary.