[UebVar]

I have worked in big environments. My idea about "big" might be naive, environments spanning different Oses and different, including old languages like fortran and pascal. But I never been in a situation where I couldn't check out said code, and open it in my ide and build it. If you can't that sounds like a another case of deficient tooling. Justifying deficient tooling.

These where not some SWE wonderlands either. The code was truly awful at times.

The Joel test is 25 years old. It's a industry standard. I, and many other people consider it a minimum requirement for software engineering. If code the "2. Can you make a build in one step?" requirement i should be ide-browsable in one step.

If it takes weeks to replicate a setup the whole environment is deeply flawed. The one-step build is the second point on the list because Joel considered it the second most important thing, out of 12.

[foooorsyth]

My situation: hardware company, over 100 years old. I’ve found useful usage examples of pieces of software I need to use, but only on an OS we no longer ship, from a supplier we no longer have a relationship with, that runs on hardware that we no longer have. The people that know how to get the dev environment up are retired.

In those cases, I’m grateful for mildly less concise languages that are more explicit at call and declaration sites.