What obsolete programming techniques are you glad to see go?

Question

G'day,

Inspired by this article here, what programming techniques are you glad to see the back of?

Has anything arisen to replace them?

For example:

• I had to learn Miditran in first year at University and we had to use punch cards. But it got worse than that. Because the physics department had no punch card machine, the punch cards had perforations and we had to poke out the holes ourselves after working out what the pattern of holes was. A right pain in the butt.
• Or using optical cards, where you had to black out the "holes". If someone used a marker instead of a dark pencil it would burn out the LDR in the reader and it would have to be replaced!

cheers

Answer 1

Monolithic programming, why separate things into logical block when you can just mash it all together.

I know I know its never really gone....

Answer 2

Boring answer: memory management (which I now see the article addressed)

Inflammatory answer: compilation on a different machine than that on which it's executed

Answer 3

Postbacks.

Answer 4

Visual Basic 6

Not a programming technique tho, but wasn't it considered GOD (Everything) in the past?!

Answer 5

IE6 while not a technique, it has required inventions of many work around techniques.

Answer 6

XML. Good riddance.

Answer 7

Include files — a much obused feature and I'm glad it's gone from most of the modern languages.

It is way too easy to break incapsulation, scoping and obfuscate code readability by using includes, they are also a real pain to unit test.

It's easy for coupling to get out of control when using them. To me an include file is a code unit with a very loosely defined interface.

Answer 8

Copy and paste ;)

Answer 9

Standard libraries.

Re-inventing the wheel gets stale after a while (plus most of us aren't that good at it). In this day and age if I want to grab a web page I shouldn't have to write more than about 4 lines of code (try to get web page, if it fails do something about it like set an error). The mount of time this saves, and the fact that I can re-use code written by people much better and smarter at something than I am is a HUGE time saver and a HUGE improvement for my code quality (seriously, how many people are smart enough to write an HTTP client that handles cookies, authentication, POST/GET/HEAD/DELETE/4 more methods, etc, etc.). Things like CPAN, Pypi, etc. that make it absolutely trivial to get and install a really good library that is easy to use is a HUGE improvement.

Answer 10

Well some that everybody was cheerish as it went but nobody recognized it just hided here and there:

GOTO

Answer 11

Most of the answers here (and in the article) have something in common, so I'll try to state the meta-logic:

Some hard-or-error-prone technique that used to be desirable or necessary due to constrained [memory|processing power|compiler sophistication|hardware facilities], that can now be safely abstracted away, but which people keep using out of habit.

It also seems that "modern" means "agreeing with my pet-peeves".

Not that these answers are wrong.

YMMV.

Answer 12

Goto for control flow.

Answer 13

The dumb char []

Answer 14

Looping on an array with

for(i = 0, j = sizeof(array); i < j; i++)
   if(array[i].something)
       do_something_to(array[i]);

instead of

foreach(item in array)
    if(item.something)
        do_something_to(item);

Answer 15

Things I don't do anymore that I used to, and are mostly obsolete:

Punch cards. Heck, paper tape. Or, for that matter, cassette tape.

Computed and arithmetic GOTOs (from FORTRAN).

Having to write my own control structures (sometimes ifs, usually loops).

Working on systems that didn't multitask and didn't have any sort of memory protection.

Any compiler that required typing in more than one arcane incantation to get it going.

Languages where terseness was required for acceptable performance (such as the Microsoft BASICs around the beginning of the home computer era).

Languages with restricted variable names (like A1).

Working without a printer because they were so awfully expensive.

Things I don't do any more, and I wish were generally obsolete:

BASIC.

Cobol.

Hand-written memory management (and, yes, I still use C++).

Cobol.

Micro-optimization without profiling.

Cobol.

Hack-and-slash unstructured coding.

Cobol.

Answer 16

Hungarian Notation

God, I hate it. And uppercase constants. Yeeech.

Answer 17

Non-automated profiling.

I say this mainly because at least 80% of the pain and stress in my life comes from the fact that the obsolete technology employed by a long-term project of mine does NOT support automated profiling of any kind. So it's more that I wish it would go.

Answer 18

The C preprocessor. While I always admire the creative hacks people use it for, it seems like any real-world C project turns into a rat's nest of #IFDEF statements, such that it's virtually impossible to figure out what a given piece of code actually does in isolation. Furthermore, it's really a separate language from C and has no concept of scoping. This necessitates giving macros unreadable, ugly, ALL_CAPS names.

The preprocessor was a great idea back when C was invented, but compiler technology has advanced. Nowadays, we have real import systems instead of #include, template/generic functions instead of macros that act like functions, mixins instead of macros that exist for inserting snippets into various places, and more general/flexible forms of conditional compilation.