The worst program I ever worked on
jacquesmattheij.com
The worst program I ever worked on
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Re: The worst program I ever worked on
#2Back in the day, I was an RPG programmer (on an AS/400), and I had a co-worker who insisted upon using geographical labels for all of his GOTO targets: GOTO BARCELONA, GOTO TOKYO, etc.
Needless to say, maintaining his code took some getting used to.
Re: The worst program I ever worked on
#3You know... programmers often invent new concepts. The temptation is to name it according to the nearest thing you can think of. Sometimes, it's better to invent a new name when the nearest name is deceptive.
By the way, if you're naming a company, life will be easiest with a made-up word, but maybe you got bucks.
Re: The worst program I ever worked on
#4Call me Captain Obvious, but I feel like quite often the time spent in obfuscating code in many cases might be a major component of why programmers that do this sort of thing get fired in the first place.
What goes on in someone's mind that says: "Maybe if I spend some time making my source code hard to understand I can better preserve my job." ?
In reality all it does is slow them down, waste their time and lead to the firing of the developer. (At which point we get to hear funny stories from people like jacquesmatteij)
If that time was spent improving/refactoring their code and working on new things, they'd actually have the job security they were so desperately seeking.
Re: The worst program I ever worked on
#5It does not need to be that complicated :)
When a company I worked for was bought the new companies tried to lay of some (most) of the employees. At this time our team was working on a product that was to a large degree implemented in Scheme (because management didn't really care about the programming language). I quit at the company (for unrelated reasons) soon thereafter, but it seems that my colleague (with whom I've implemented the system) had quite a good job security at this time.
Re: The worst program I ever worked on
#6I've watched enough "programmers at play" and read enough code to happily believe that this guy was just letting his sense of humor have its day. I'm not at all convinced that things like this are deliberate obfuscation. Of course, I'm not the one who had to disentangle it all.
We've all read bad code with bad names that nonetheless "works" (except perhaps for the occasional minor glitch). This is perhaps just one that combines poor programming style with a mis-placed sense of humor.
Re: The worst program I ever worked on
#7Call me Captain Obvious, but I feel like quite often the time spent in obfuscating code in many cases might be a major component of why programmers that do this sort of thing get fired in the first place. What goes on in someone's mind that says: "Maybe if I spend some time making my source code hard to understand I can better preserve my job." ? In reality all it does is slow them down, waste their time and lead to…
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Re: The worst program I ever worked on
#8Call me Captain Obvious, but I feel like quite often the time spent in obfuscating code in many cases might be a major component of why programmers that do this sort of thing get fired in the first place. What goes on in someone's mind that says: "Maybe if I spend some time making my source code hard to understand I can better preserve my job." ? In reality all it does is slow them down, waste their time and lead to…
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Re: The worst program I ever worked on
#9A project I worked at during an internship had an unmanaged C++ portion for rendering complex typography, which was written when every letter in a variable cost $10 (or so it seems). The result was that "pointer to a metadata character" became the variable "pmc", and that was just the beginning of it. I never quite did understand what the variable lpmnoics meant, and debugging the C++ was quite the drag and the task everybody avoided, and pushed off to the original developer of that code (who happened to be in a different geographic location).
Re: The worst program I ever worked on
#10One semester I was TA'ing a certain course all electrical and computer engineering students are required to take.
One student named all his variables in phonetic chinese (using the utf8 character set of course).
Another student named all his variables after superheros.