Woefully unqualified “programmers”

As I was reading the absolute train wreck of a unit test in Testing with a Lisp (Daily WTF), the song “What the fuck is going on?” popped into my head, like it always does when I see that a programmer not only didn’t understand the assignment, not only doesn’t know how to program, but also doesn’t know that they don’t know how to program.

They are living their best life because they don’t think that “knowing how to program” is required in order to be a programmer. Neither does their boss or team, I guess.

That’s when the music starts to play in my head, and I think of little blind Dillon playing football because a very non-PC friend[1] sent me that video so many years ago.

Am I going to link the video? Of course I am. Because I’m a terrible person.[2]

BLIND KID PLAYING FOOTBALL WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON by RelentingPeach (YouTube)

And this is the test from the article above.

test("Returned objects arguments immutable (a b)", function() {
  var result = lispParser("(a b)");
  expect(3);
  ok(typeof(result) === 'object', "result is an object");
  var children = result.arguments;
  var newValue = 2;
  var firstChild = children[0];
  if (children[0] == newValue) {
    firstChild = ++newValue;
  }
  notEqual(result.arguments[0], newValue, "Underlying array was immutable");
  equal(result.arguments[0], firstChild, "Underlying array was immutable");
});

Highlight anything you think seems stupidNothing about that test makes any sense. It will always pass. It is, in its own way, a work of art. It is the JavaScript equivalent of Chomsky’s Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Wikipedia), an example of a sentence that is “grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical”.

Honestly, this looks worse than anything I’ve seen my students try to write. They usually have enough shame that they don’t bother filling in an answer if they really have no idea what’s going on.

I’m also wondering, of course, whether this is the work of an AI—or the bastard child of a poseur-programmer and an AI. The future is bright.