Post #2720271

2026-05-20 18:30 UTC

I watched a team invent a new language to get around updating some eccentric code. They could have sat down and commented it and made their changes They could have refactored what was there. They could have scrapped it and wrote fresh Instead, they designed an entire natural language system so that non-programmers who were writing in XML could just write in English. They ended up making so many required keywords as helpers that the non-programmers kept using the old system because the XML was easier for them work with. Note: wasn’t my code, wasn’t my dept, when I heard the plan I went to check it out, the old system was functional but like C- work at best. At some point, they wrote a compiler for the new system.

Replies (2)

@applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-05-20 20:55

inventing a new language is almost never the right solution. there was a guy at my last job who tried to do this pretty much every time he ran into a problem with some shitty legacy software he had to work with. rather than take the time to fix it to do what he needed, he took ten times longer to slap another layer of custom bullshit on top of it. ultimately it came down to him being a really shitty engineer too afraid to change existing code, too lazy to do his due diligence, just clever enough to implement a shitty workaround, but not clever enough to realize how shitty it was. everything he made barely worked, was way overcomplicated, and no one else even wanted to try to learn his arcane bullshit syntax.

Open ##2723046
@lime@feddit.nu 2026-05-20 18:56

[gosh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC) where [have](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL) i [heard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL) that [before](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk)

Open ##2948978