Hats off to the coders

If you write programming code for fun or for a living, I tip my hat to you.

I hate coding. Passionately. Luckily I don't have to do it often, but when I do, ugh. One of my duties as a civil engineer is to cut roadway cross sections. For the uninitiated, imagine looking at a set of roadway plans. You can see the length and width, but nothing regarding the depth. Cross sections are the plans rotated 90 degrees into the ground so that you can see the crown of the road, the various pavement layers, the adjoining side slopes, and the underground utilities. But, you can only see it at that one point in the road. So, you cut sections at varying places along the road. On my current job, its at least every 50 feet, for 3800 feet. Roughly 76 sections.

In the olden days of draftsmen and pencils, they'd draw each individual section. If something about the road changed, each section had to be re-drawn. But now we've got the ol' computers to do the linework for us. So, instead of laboring over a drafting board for hours, painstakingly creating straight lines, I have to labor over a computer, painstakingly debugging my input files.

This program (GEOPAK Road) has LOUSY debugging features. It has lousy nested if/else requirements. I spent 30 minutes looking for the unclosed if/else it was telling me I missed, when it was a "then" statement that I left out. Which was my fault for not paying more attention my copying and pasting.

Sorry for the rant, but I have a genuine admiration for anybody who can code day in, and day out. How you don't go insane is beyond me.

I've attached a copy of my madness if you want to see the drivel that I have to put up with. I'm sure its nothing compared to real programming, but it still drives me nuts.
View attachment curbsidenslope.txt

 

Sort of reminds me of when i had to use Matlab during circuits labs, which is a program i truly hate (probably because i was never tought how to use it properly).

 

Well, it's a very tidy program.

Of course, the only way that I survived programming was by coming up with some VERY unique/interesting variable/function names. By the time I was done with a program, you were either laughing, or wondering what the heck you were looking at.

GL.


-DC

 

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Haha... it's so true. I have a BS and a MS in Computer Science, and I really disliked the programming the whole time I was doing it. I could do it just fine, but it was not my idea of fun. I try to do it as little as possible. Enjoy!

 

I too admire programmers. I took a comp sci class in high school (VB) and last semester (C). VB was so easy to use, but jumping up to C was hell. It gave me nightmares and late nights trying to find the syntax errors. I guess it's just so tedious that certain people have the attention span for it and others (myself) get bored with quickly.

 

I frikken hate coding, and the quality of my work reflects this fact. If I need any real code work done, I have a friend do it.

He often says, "Man you do **** code! You would fit right in at Microsoft."

 

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why isn't CAD used? it uses cartiesian points, i use it for all the civil engineering from site surveys. no code to sort and i can watch my drawing as it goes. curious...

 

This is a plug-in for Microstation. The problem with this particular design is that there isn't one prototype section that I can apply to every other section. By writing the code, GEOPAK will look at each existing ground profile, and customize the section to the conditions, within the constraints defined in the code.