Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Workaround-oriented programming

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Workaround-oriented programming

This needs more. Any ideas? If not, no worries, but how's what's there already? 1234 ~ 04:57, 13 February 2011

PEE REVIEW IN PROGRESS Hyperbole is engaged in the dual processes of giving you his opinion and pretending you care.

PREPEARE YOURSELF, FOR I AM DIALING THE HARSHNESS UP TO ELEVEN pillow talk 21:20, February 14, 2011 (UTC)

Oh, it's going to be one of those reviews, is it? 1234 ~ 21:41, 14 February 2011

Humour:	9	Okay, this had me grinning from ear-to-ear the whole way through. I'm a bit of an amateur programmer myself, in that I taught myself QuickBasic entirely through trial and error, and I've been known to alter PERL scripts, PHP, C++, whatever, without the slightest understanding of what I'm actually doing. So, to me, this was a parody of me, and such a well-done one. Let's take it section by section: Lede: Nice to finally see a lede of some substantial length! It lays out the concept exactly the way it should; even though I pretty much got the concept from the title, I think this is very important to do. I have one little problem with it, though: I don't really like the final sentence "Eventually, however, and usually at the worst possible moment, whatever the programming was intended to control will finally exceed the capacity of one of the smaller workarounds, at which point the entire system will invariably take to opportunity to implode." The reason for this is - every programmer, amateur and professional, knows that code consisting entire of quick fixes will eventually collapse under its own weight, refusing to compile and becoming utterly incomphrehensible to anyone reading it. You don't need to point that out. You shouldn't point that out. If "workaround-oriented programming" is a parody of "object-oriented programming", you should write the article roughly the same way: consider even the bugs to be features. So, for example with that sentence, I would have gone with something closer to "Eventualy, however, whatever the programming was intended to control will finally exceed the capacity of one of the workaround, and the code itself will appear to be nothing more than an incoherent jumble of punctuation. Fortunately, there are several workarounds available for this." Overview: The first two paragraphs are good. I think they're *creeping up to* the line between encyclopedic and ranty, but they don't cross it. The engine block paragraph, though - again, I want to go exactly the opposite way. I want to see something more like "Where a traditional programming approach would be to rebuild the engine, the workaround-oriented programmer simply secures it in place with scotch tape, dental floss, and some gum he borrowed from his girlfriend. This allows the workaround-oriented programmer to achieve the same result with barely one-tenth of the effort. I mean, everyone's going to see the problem with an engine held in place with dental floss; you don't have to beat the reader over the head with it. Similarly, in the next paragraph - I'd like to see some language that looks more like a pathetic attempt to claim that our military rockets are actually more responsive due to workaround-oriented programming, and let the patheticness of the claim carry the joke, than a simple declaration that our rockets are in the hands of idiots who patch up their code with bailing wire and band-aids. Because, here, again, the article is tiiiptoeing up to that line between "satire" and "I'm fucking annoyed by my co-workers/collaborators/whoever the fuck wrote this piece of shit." Design patterns: I like the idea of workaround-oriented programming in the ancient world, but I'd much rather see it applied to mechanics than philosophy. I mean, what you're saying here is a controversy that we've all been drug through a million times "Religion doesn't make any sense and it's just... patchy." The metaphor to programming isn't inapt, and I don't hate it. But, well, maybe you'll consider me a coward for saying this, but - I think I would have preferred wacky to controversial. I think I would have preferred something about trying to change the angle of the Tower of Piza simply by ordering people to dig a hole under one corner. Or, you know, catapulting diseased cows into a courtyard as a workaround for having functioning siege engines. Lots of possibilities. I do very much like the rest of it - but, again, sometimes it tinges ranty. You end it with "The rest are all reusing each other's code and forming it into new and creative overly-complicated piles of crap." I always find that humor works a little better when you keep it light, keep it affectionate, keep it positive. Why not something more like "The rest are all reusing each other's code, each creatively adding new and creative additions, until the insanely unnecessary complexity of the code can be seen as one of the true Wonders of the Modern World." Something like that. I mean, we all know that insanely unnecessary complexity is a bad thing. Calling it "crap" is just crabby. And it's unencyclopedic - when would you ever see Wikipedia aggressively denigrate its own subject material? (Oh, right - on Wikipedia:9/11 Conspiracy Theroies. I stand corrected.)
Concept:	9	Absolutely hilarious concept with so much potential (much of which is fulfilled). I am forced to deduct one point only because I can see in the logs that you were not the first person to think of it.
Prose and formatting:	8	For the most part, this is some of the best prose I've seen on Uncyclopedia. There were a few typos, but they were so minor I just went ahead and fixed them. The one sentence that struck me as awkward was "Meanwhile the application becomes more and more unwieldy, yet the workaround-oriented programmer gleans almost no overall comprehension of what he is actually doing." The two parts of the sentence don't seem very related - they're more like two sentences. You might consider "Meanwhile, despite adding hundreds of lines of unwieldy code to the application, the workaround-programmer is at no point expected to comprehend what he is actually doing." I'm giving it a score of 8 mostly because, as I said, I'm not completely comfortable that it drifts from an encyclopedic expository style ("X is Y because Z") to more of an essay style ("X is really lame and I don't like it.")
Images:	8	I like the rocket and the cat. The tree growing through the car, though, I don't care for. I think it's a little hard to see what's going on in that picture without staring at it for a while, and, frankly, I don't think a third picture is necessary.
Miscellaneous:	10	You say this "needs more." I disagree. Some Uncyclopedians tend to push for longer and longer articles - why?? Good comedy is short. It's punchy. There's a reason that The West Wing is 54 minutes long and Family Guy is 22 minutes long: even something genuinely funny gets exhausting after a surprisingly short while. Like I said, I was grinning like an idiot reading this, but by the time I got to the last section, I was thinking "Hmm, this is kind of long, and I'm sort of losing my attention span, and I feel done with this article." Longer isn't better. I don't think it's any coincidence that my most popular FAs - the ones every Uncyclopedian is familiar with - are also, generally, my shortest. Poodle and Raccoons - very little investment needed on the part of the reader. Look, laugh, share. And there's a reason that Wizard took #2 of 2010, and that Winkler and Sojourn are so popular. Yeah, of course we need articles much longer than those, but my point is: we don't really need articles longer than this one is, right now. It is absolutely, unquestionably, long enough. Please do not add additional sections.
Final Score:	44	It probably goes without saying given all the green, but I'll vote for this right now if you want to nom it. Happy Valentine's Day!
Reviewer:	pillow talk 22:02, February 14, 2011 (UTC)

See, Lyrithya? I told you articles don't need to be hellishly long to be good. /me goes off to create another article instead of expanding an existing article. —Sir Socky (talk) (stalk) GUN SotM UotM PMotM UotY PotM WotM 04:00, 15 February 2011

Doesn't mean short ones are necessarily good, either... 1234 ~ 04:06, 15 February 2011