Friday 29 March 2019

Goto, Goto!


Southampton Water

Drained pool, Southampton Sports Centre

Theresa May's notoriously robotic assertion, that "Brexit means Brexit", will have struck most as a bit of rhetorical tautology: "east is east, and west is west", etc. To those of us who have written the odd program, however, it was clear that the Maybot was simply indulging in the deprecated practice of giving a constant and a variable the same name. Or, at least, her programmers were.

Worse, she / they committed the further sin of failing to declare the variable ${brexit}, assign it a type, and, ideally, initialise it with a value. Even worse, and fatally, she / they then compiled the program and ran it, without any testing or beta phase. Amateurs!

The Development Team have now spent the best part of three years trying to debug this fundamentally flawed program, and the Maybot is stuck in a classic infinite loop. Someone is going to have to do something as crude and as deprecated as stick in a simple "goto" here, before the stack overflows.

Meanwhile, here are some pictures of the real world in March.

St. Cross, Winchester

Cricket pitch, Southampton Sports Centre

4 comments:

Julian Behrisch Elce said...

Good Luck over there, Mike. The cow picture is brilliant!
Might there be an analogy between Br***t and the way cows eat, digest, regurgitate, chew, digest, poop and, well, get milked or slaughtered?

Mike C. said...

Thanks, Julian.

Luck is not what we need, sadly... (although I suppose a large meteorite taking out Downing Street couldn't hurt...)

Mike

Thomas Rink said...

If the Brexit was a software project, I would say that their mistake was that they didn't nail down the requirements up front, i.e. what the Brexit should deliver. Leave the EU, yeah, but then what? In consequence, the scope of the entire project and the project vision was absolutely unclear. Additionally, they fixed the time box too early - they agreed on a delivery date for, well, something. And now, at the due date, they are still in the specification process. Epic fail.

As I understand, the first detailed plan - the Chequers plan - had been developed in July 2018, and consequently two secretaries resigned. At that point, I knew that they were heading for disaster. If I was your prime minister, I wouldn't have started the article 50 procedure unless I had organized a solid backing for my plan at home, and at least a basic understanding with the EU.

I work as a technical project lead at a software company, and such a level of incompetence would certainly get me fired. But, wait, I could still apply for a project management position at the Berlin airport ;^)

Best, Thomas

Mike C. said...

Thomas,

All true. Especially kicking off Article 50. Epic fail, indeed.

Still, we may yet get to cancel the whole thing, and pretend it never happened... Strange to think I'm writing this 20 minutes away from the original deadline!

Mike