An old friend asked me to look over some Objective-C code to see if I could help him identify why the program stopped working. I was going over the code to see if I could help and noticed the code had no exception handling!
It seems they recently noticed when their program connected to a remote server it crashed hard. So hard that some times they had to reboot a Mac!
Really, they paid some guy to write what I call “Blue Sky” code! You know, when the developer assumes nothing will ever go wrong…
To make it worse, when they tested it they let him do the test and so of course he never entered “bad” data.
Besides that problem there were memory leaks all over the place. He was allocating variables all over the place and didn’t do a single release! Nope, he didn’t use garbage collection either.
The really sad thing is he took a year and charged them double my hourly rate!
Well, I’m going to fix the code and clean up a few ‘rough’ spots. Then I’ll teach them how to write a software specification that covers exception handling and debugging.
