I wonder what it actually means to reverse engineer a program written in Dutch to understand the operating system in order to collect metrics.
“Also, they ran legacy code written in Dutch—a language Borkowski doesn’t speak.
Borkowski ended up reverse-engineering the machines to figure out their operating systems, then reprogrammed them to communicate with the new data-collection system”
If my experience reverse engineering PHP written in Dutch is anything to go by, it means the function and variable names, comments, database columns, logs... would all be in Dutch -- or potentially worse, in Dutch but using English words. Which in turn means they sometimes won't necessarily have an accurate translation to English, in most cases a single translation at any rate, and you'd have to do a ton of disambiguation to make sense of anything.
Yes, this. I do support for programmers and regularly get examples showing problems. Occasionally these are written by non English speakers.
Obviously I understand the programming language part, but all the variables and functions are just "random strings". It's really interesting to me how much that affects my ability to read the vode and make sense of it.
Turns out when my teacher said "use meaningful variable names" that was good advice.
I'd add that if you're too lazy to do that, use pronounceable names. I have no problem with loop counters being x or y or whatever. Just don't make it gedoogenshcpekel.
“Also, they ran legacy code written in Dutch—a language Borkowski doesn’t speak.
Borkowski ended up reverse-engineering the machines to figure out their operating systems, then reprogrammed them to communicate with the new data-collection system”