Tuesday
Dec062005
Scrapyard Coding
Tuesday, December 6, 2005 at 10:54PM
One of my must watch TV programs recently has been Scrapheap Challenge (stateside it is called Junkyard Wars). Anyhoo, a bunch of engineers are given an impossible task (for example build a man powered airplane in a couple of days) and then turned loose. The results are always amazing, especially if it all goes wrong. My personal favourite was when they had to build a device to throw a Mini car as far as possible. One team made a trebuchet (a kind of catapult) which flew apart in the throwing action in a most impressive way.
I was wondering if you couldn't do something similar with programming. A team of coders is given something to produce, say an invoicing system, and then sent out into a software scrapyard to grab the bits and bobs that they need to finish the job. The commentary would be great:
"And that's a terrific start for Team Hardcoders, that disused COBOL print formatting routine will make a fantastic interface to the barrel printer that they found earlier. But what's this? The other team seem to have discovered a stash of unused GOTO statements amongst a pile of punched cards. Noooooooooo!"
I was wondering if you couldn't do something similar with programming. A team of coders is given something to produce, say an invoicing system, and then sent out into a software scrapyard to grab the bits and bobs that they need to finish the job. The commentary would be great:
"And that's a terrific start for Team Hardcoders, that disused COBOL print formatting routine will make a fantastic interface to the barrel printer that they found earlier. But what's this? The other team seem to have discovered a stash of unused GOTO statements amongst a pile of punched cards. Noooooooooo!"
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