A tale of 3 programmers

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marcelk
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Joined: 13 May 2018, 08:26

A tale of 3 programmers

Post by marcelk »

[On-topic for this board because it happened in Cambridge on my way to the Retro Computing Festival at the excellent Centre for Computing History]

There I learnt that the Uber app was written by 3 programmers at the very minimum. How do I know? When the credit card you gave it years ago has expired, you can't order a ride until you fix that. So you navigate to the section where it stores your payment methods.

Programmer #1 forgot to add the feature for updating the expiration date and security code
Programmer #2 doesn't allow you to add a new card if its number equals another already in use
Programmer #3 doesn't allow you to delete the card if no valid payment methods remain

These brilliant minds need to get together for a coffee and discuss the concept of "deadlock".

Have a nice weekend, Marcel

P.S: The workaround of course is to add a different card, if you happen to have one. Luckily I did and I had a great time at the museum, meeting many old and new friends, including quite a few Gigatron owners! I don't recall I met any last year, so the bug is spreading. Very special thanks to monsonite to help support the Gigatron exhibit and his enjoyable company.

P.S: It's hard to pick a favourite, but this year I was especially fond of this IBM 5100: a 1975 discrete component portable(!) machine with up to 64K, if you were rich, that ran APL and BASIC out of the box. Yes: the predecessor to the iconic IBM 5150 PC was a portable.
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