[LINK] ChatGPT Can Be Broken by Entering These Strange Words, And Nobody Is Sure Why

[David]

On 10/2/23 16:17, Roger Clarke wrote:
> *But* I admit to being stuck in a time-warp, thinking back to when programmers actually had a reasonable idea of what they were doing, rather than just blundering along with little knowledge of the machine beneath them, little interest in user needs, and no interest at all in performance quality.

That describes the antithesis of good, professional  Software Engineering (and HTML user-interface design) very well.

LibreOffice, that otherwise admirable product from the Open Document Foundation, has an API which allows users to write their own extensions in Java or C.  A LibreOffice extension is deployed as a single .oxt file which is platform-independent, so it runs on Linus, MS Windows, or any other O/S supported by LibreOffice.  It's great stuff, especially when spreadsheet formulae begin to become unwieldy and error prone as can happens in some investigations.

However the following comment https://flywire.github.io/lo-p/index.html at the start of a lengthy how-to article on GitHub sums up the quality of the documentation: 
> This comment from Dan Dascalescu offers a challenge to the community:
>
> After 20 years of software development, the LibreOffice API is the crappiest one I've had the "pleasure" of working with.  The documentation is horrible, spread all over the place, littered with Uyghur, or completely missing.  The LibreOffice macro IDE is also extremely unhelpful.

LO released some SDK "skeleton maker" tools apparently in an attempt to ease the pain.  But the relevant documentation only describes the skeletonmaker arguments and, even then, is downright wrong in one instance IMO.  It sheds no light whatsoever on the resultant code, including an opaque Java class.  In response to my enquiry on the Developer's email list, one person remarked he didn't know why users didn't answer their own questions by reading the open-source code.  What??!!!  I tried that anyway though C isn't my language, and apart from the afore-mentioned skeletonmaker arguments, the code is completely uncommented, zilch.

I hate to say it, but this sort of documentation reminds me of some student project groups who arrive at their first lecture thinking Software Engineering is all about slouching into a nice corner of a cafe for a few hours, ordering one coffee, flipping open their laptop, and writing brilliant, uncommented, code.  Software design?  Documentation?  Testing?

There, I feel better now...!  I'd go for a walk too, but it's around 32 degC outside.

_David Lochrin_