Iterative vs. Recursive coding

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

BartC a écrit :
> "Steven D'Aprano" <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> wrote in 
> message news:4c6f8edd$0$28653$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com...
>> On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:23:23 +0200, Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
> 
>>> I onced worked in a shop (Win32 desktop / accouting applications mainly)
>>> where I was the only guy that could actually understand recursion. FWIW,
>>> I also was the only guy around that understood "hairy" (lol) concepts
>>> like callback functions, FSM, polymorphism, hashtables, linked lists,
>>> ADTs, algorithm complexity etc...
>>
>>
>> Was there anything they *did* understand, or did they just bang on the
>> keyboard at random until the code compiled? *wink*
> 
> You underestimate how much programming (of applications) can be done 
> without needing any of this stuff.

 From personal experience : almost nothing worth being maintained. I'm 
talking about complex domain-specific applications here - not shell 
scripts or todo-lists.

>>> Needless to say, I didn't last long !-)
>>
>> And rightly so :)
> 
> I guess they wanted code that could be maintained by anybody.

The code base was an unmaintainable, undecipĥerable mess loaded with 
global state (litteraly *hundreds* of global variables), duplication, 
dead code, and enough WTF to supply thedailywtf.com for years - to make 
a long story short, the perfect BigBallOfMudd. FWIW, the company didn't 
last long neither - they just kept on introducing ten new bugs each time 
they "fixed" one.