How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
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How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
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Re: How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
#2Did God tell you, like Moses?
Nigger.
As Stalin says, "Quantity has a quality all its own."
Re: How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
#3use perl
Re: How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
#4genius! :)
Re: How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
#5> You earn extra Brownie points whenever the beginning and end of a block appear on separate pages in a printed listing.
I'm aware that this is from 1997-1999, but I'm curious: Do people still print out source code for better reading?
Re: How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
#6Also a later version at http://www.stateslab.org/HowToWriteUnmaintainableCode-Green0... which includes that crazy offbeat language, JavaScript (which was, amusingly, my contribution).
Re: How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
#7> You earn extra Brownie points whenever the beginning and end of a block appear on separate pages in a printed listing. I'm aware that this is from 1997-1999, but I'm curious: Do people still print out source code for better reading?
Yes. Well, relatively recently. I did it just a couple of years ago.
Re: How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
#8use perl
javascript is OK too. Avoid Python.
Re: How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
#9> You earn extra Brownie points whenever the beginning and end of a block appear on separate pages in a printed listing. I'm aware that this is from 1997-1999, but I'm curious: Do people still print out source code for better reading?
If you have a lot of code printing it all out and laying it out on a spare desk - so you can look at all the code in one go is still useful.
Re: How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)
#10> You earn extra Brownie points whenever the beginning and end of a block appear on separate pages in a printed listing. I'm aware that this is from 1997-1999, but I'm curious: Do people still print out source code for better reading?
The essay was presented half-seriously as part of a module on software maintainability [1], which I took in 2007. Perl was given as an example of a write-only language: modification of a typical Perl program requires at least a partial re-write. (The extra joke was that many of the computing department's internal systems were written in Perl.)
More seriously, there were discussions of library versioning schemes, backward compatibility etc.
I see Susan no longer lectures, which is a shame, as she was one of my favourite lecturers.
[1] https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~susan/475/
(The replacement course seems to be this: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/computing/current-students/courses... )