Adobe PSD pushes programmer too far You work long hours, for an ungrateful organization wasting time programming around other peoples' mistakes and botched code. And that's in a commercial operation - never mind the unpaid effort that goes into community open-source projects. Venting in code comments, leaving hidden messages, and inserting the odd codified F**k- …
There is sometimes a period in which you are studying something and you truly can't tell whether you are just missing the big picture or if what you are working for is in fact a poorly designed, incomprehensible and incoherent mess.
Usually there is an ah-ha moment where you realize what the original designer was thinking, so you keep trying to wrap your brain around it, approaching it from different angles, all with the assumption that the designers choices were part of a rational, well though plan.
What would even be more helpful is if the creator(s) of the format would have dotted their code with comments such as
//This is an ugly hack, but I've been working 24 hours straight surviving on energy drinks
I'd love to have his babies, from the hero aspect, but you just don't cut your salary, present and future, by doing that sort of stuff. Next thing I know he will be unemployed which rather messes with the future of my children.
Fortunately I am less impressed with God. The back I can cope with but not being able to fart, and the rest of the backup, is something else.
While I can understand his frustration entirely, and his desire to rant about incomprehensible formats, I can't help but wonder whether if he had gone through the bureaucratic nightmare necessary to obtain the format specification and documents rather than presumably attempt to reverse engineer the mess, they might have actually helped understand it and made life easier? Probably not, but I can wonder...
Steve.
While I was writing encoding/decoding software to this spec, I was reminded of The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, what with all of the "shall be" and "shall not" when encoding integer types.
The Microsoft implementation simply blew past all of that strict complexity and did it wrong.
The PSD format is very old. It has been forced to do things that were never intended for it and has to maintain backward compatibilty. I'm guessing that in the original version the development was implementation driven so that it would actually work on a machine with 256k of memory and the file format had to accomodate that. The programmer has also chosen to use a language that's more remote from the architecture than the original (probably C) would have been which can only make things more difficult.
Having said that Adobe produces some pretty abysmal formats (or one format rehashed): TIFF / PS / PDF.
"...if he had gone through the bureaucratic nightmare necessary to obtain the format specification and documents [...], they might have actually helped ..."
Well, as you go on to say, they might but they might not. It depends partly on whether the implementation matches the spec and partly on whether the spec really is the steaming pile of shit that it appears to be. When a company goes out of its way to make it hard to find out, I tend to assume the latter. This is the same company that makes (or certainly used to make) its products available only through a "download engine" that couldn't cope with a NAT, so they definitely have "form" on the clueless tossers front.
Hey! PostScript is not bad. It's a computationally-complete language. Although, a heavy session of PostScript programming does tend to make it hard for you to program anything else except a HP calculator for awhile.
You should try writing a Perl script which generates a PostScript document, then spits it through ps2pdf. I have -- and every single person who has ever seen it thinks it's the DBs.
"when he uses a goto statement on line 432"
So friggin what? If you subscribe to the out of date "never ever use a goto anywhere" paradigm more fool you. If you look carefully you'll notice he was using it to jump out of some nested loops
before the inner loop was commented out. A lot more sensible than the idiotic "if (flag) break" nonsense to do the same I see from the brainwashed Knuth acolytes.
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