And, for clarification, all of the USB ports on my laptop are broken, so I'm unable to use anything but the touchpad.
That right there is reason enough to go all Rage Guy.
My pet rage for the last few days has been, as stupid as it sounds, a public healthcare IT project I'm not even involved in.
A major public hospital in Finland is going to get an Electronic Patient Register, which would be all well and good, except...
The solution they're likely to adopt is likely to be written in a lovely little thing called
MUMPS, a hospital/lab application language developed in the 60's.
How bad is it, you ask?
Well, this is what Maths looks like to MUMPS:
3*2+1=7
Okay, so far, so good.
1+2*3=9
Wait,
what?
9+"banana"=TRUE
Where is your logic now, little man?The rest of the syntax isn't any better. Basically, it's a bunch of single-letter command abbreviations (case-sensitive) and
functionally significant formatting (e.g. default scope of a FOR clause is until end of line, a double space is functionally different than a single space, ...)
Most bizarrely of all, in case the above code sample didn't make it clear,
there are no data type checks of any kind, anywhere. You can actually add the character string "banana" to the integer 9 and use that as a truth value for an IF clause. (If it's >0, it counts as TRUE.) Or you could go totally wild and e(X)ecute the variable contents as if they were a part of the program code. Oh, and there's no variable declaration or scope either, so good luck keeping track of your x:s and n:s.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS.aspxHow could anything possibly go wrong there?
Seriously, how could
any reasonable human being come up with something as
brain-damaged as this and consider actually using it in
any non-
joke fashion a good thing?! It's basically an affront to every known sound practice and convention in programming
and Maths!'Sus' Byteordered, Coder has gone berserk!