The worst program I ever worked on

Any job worth doing is worth doing right. Contrariwise, any job worth fucking up is worth fucking up stupendously. He didn't go all the way.

  #define monkeymeat printf
  #define turtlescrotum malloc
  #define wolfnipplechips gets
  #define chipotlaway exit
  ...

It wasn't so bad.

Now debugging code written by Chemistry Students... that's some scary stuff right there.

Which is not to go all elitist and put Comp Sci degrees up on a pedestal, one of the better coders I've had the pleasure of working with was a trained vet. He was very methodical.

Actually, now that I think about it, working with something that if you make it angry it will bite your hand off, is probably good preparation for dealing with a compiler...

I was about done implementing the first draft of my side and asked the other side how it was going so we could test some actual communication. The response I got was "it's about done, we just need to split it up into functions". I was initially shocked and then naively impressed that someone could actually reason about the problem without breaking it down.

The end result was of course that I just had to give up and implement both sides of the communication. This was eventually a much better learning experience. I ended up abstracting out the serial port and allowing the two sides to communicate through a unix pipe with random bit errors introduced in packets to test the recovery. I could then run much longer testing without depending on the lab or someone else. I think I eventually tested it enough that I was up against the fundamental problem that the cheap checksum we were using let errors pass way too easily.

Hell, Arizona or any other village with that name. Real C# code can be like this:

    if(John is evil){ goto Hell};

The first thing I did was chuck it into VS2010 and run some code metrics on it. The results follow,

10 or so Methods had 2000+ lines of code. The maintainability index was 0 (number between 0 and 100 where 0 is unmaintainable). The worst function had a cyclomatic complexity of 2500 (the worst I have ever seen on a function before was 750 odd). It was full of nested inline dynamic SQL all of which refered to tables with 100+ columns, which had helpful names like sdf_324. There were about 5000 stored procedures of which most were 90% similar to other ones with a similar naming scheme. There were no foreign key constraints in the database. Every query including updates, inserts and deletes used NOLOCK (so no data integrity). It all lived in a single 80,000 line file, which crashed VS every time you tried to do a simple edit.

I essentially told my boss I would quit over it as there was no way I could support it without other aspects of work suffering. Thankfully it was put in the too hard basket and nobody else had to endure my pain.

I ended up peer reviewing the changes the guy made some time later and a single column update touched in the order of 500 lines of code.

EDIT - I forgot to mention, there was so much nested if code in methods you could hold down page down and it would look like the page was moving the other way, similar to how a wheel on tv looks like its spinning the other way.