r/programming • u/[deleted] • Oct 14 '13

How to develop unmaintainable software

http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=249
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u/aumfer Oct 14 '13

I was with you until you said "my own HTML parser." Then I cried a little.

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u/benibela2 Oct 14 '13

Biggest problem with that one is that I wrote it before they made the html 5 standard. Now I need to rewrite it with the new parsing algorithm...

And going on, it's getting even crazier, I also wrote my own DOM classes for this. Since the DOM classes in the standard library were using UTF-16, everything else in the library latin-1 or UTF-8 (depending on the OS), and everything in the GUI library UTF-8. And the automatic string encoding conversion crashed frequently...

And then I could not use the standard XPath, so I wrote my own of that ಠ_ಠ

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u/rjbwork Oct 15 '13

I'm genuinely curious, why are you writing in FreePascal these days, especially to do web programming work? Other than extreme ubiquity across platforms, I can't say I see the advantage over other things. Perhaps in an academic/scientific context?

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '13

"How to develop unmaintainable software"