Stupid variable names
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Years ago, another developer told me about a special coding horror... he had an developer that falled in love and so he called for the next module all his variables with the name of his beloved... from Susi001 to Susixxx :) Now, try to read such a program ...
Daniel Ch. Bloch (MCSD, MCAD, MCTS) wrote:
Years ago, another developer told me about a special coding horror... he had an developer that falled in love and so he called for the next module all his variables with the name of his beloved... from Susi001 to Susixxx Now, try to read such a program ...
:laugh: In the really geeky days, I knew a guy who named all his vars after Star Trek characters. "Spock1", "Kirk42".
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The absolut hardes thing I found was when I searched for a bug in a Module written in some kind of PL/I. I tried to understand, why a special line of code does not work, using 'true' and 'false' Boolean statements... now ... my forerunner was able du redefine true and false so that true was 0 and false was -1 ... incredible!
In my first Fortran program I managed to redefine a constant 3 (written as a digit '3' in the source) to something else (by passing it to a subroutine that changed its argument) and then the program would crash at the DO statement which should have executed 3 times. I never figured it out, needed a senior colleague to find it for me.
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Daniel Ch. Bloch (MCSD, MCAD, MCTS) wrote:
Years ago, another developer told me about a special coding horror... he had an developer that falled in love and so he called for the next module all his variables with the name of his beloved... from Susi001 to Susixxx Now, try to read such a program ...
:laugh: In the really geeky days, I knew a guy who named all his vars after Star Trek characters. "Spock1", "Kirk42".
I used to know a sys admin who named all the hardware after Star Trek things. A server was called StarBase1 and it had printers attached to it called DeepSpace1 and so on. The reason he did this - he was called Pete Warr and we had the habit of using the first 4 characters of the surname and the first initial as user names so he was warrp (mind you, he was luckier than Kenny Cockburn, he really had problems with his login).
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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Years ago, another developer told me about a special coding horror... he had an developer that falled in love and so he called for the next module all his variables with the name of his beloved... from Susi001 to Susixxx :) Now, try to read such a program ...
An old favourite of mine was a piece of commercial software code I ran across in college. The programmer had a particular routine which was used to handle error exceptions, close any open files, etc. and terminate. He decided to mark the routine with the label HELL. Why? So that whenever he detected that something had gone wrong he could write GOTO...
Clive Pottinger Victoria, BC
modified on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 4:48:12 PM
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I used to know a sys admin who named all the hardware after Star Trek things. A server was called StarBase1 and it had printers attached to it called DeepSpace1 and so on. The reason he did this - he was called Pete Warr and we had the habit of using the first 4 characters of the surname and the first initial as user names so he was warrp (mind you, he was luckier than Kenny Cockburn, he really had problems with his login).
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
A couple of sys admin i know have named their server room "the shire" all the *nix server names have a LOTR theme to them and the windows servers are named after the sith. eg Darth Maul.
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A couple of sys admin i know have named their server room "the shire" all the *nix server names have a LOTR theme to them and the windows servers are named after the sith. eg Darth Maul.
:laugh::laugh::laugh:
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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An old favourite of mine was a piece of commercial software code I ran across in college. The programmer had a particular routine which was used to handle error exceptions, close any open files, etc. and terminate. He decided to mark the routine with the label HELL. Why? So that whenever he detected that something had gone wrong he could write GOTO...
Clive Pottinger Victoria, BC
modified on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 4:48:12 PM
:laugh::laugh::laugh: That is good.
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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An old favourite of mine was a piece of commercial software code I ran across in college. The programmer had a particular routine which was used to handle error exceptions, close any open files, etc. and terminate. He decided to mark the routine with the label HELL. Why? So that whenever he detected that something had gone wrong he could write GOTO...
Clive Pottinger Victoria, BC
modified on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 4:48:12 PM
Very cool. :laugh:
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I've seen some good ones, but this has to be one of the best
MyCrapClassVector something_to_which_to_point;
He thought he had to declare this to pass a "dummy" ptr var to a method. Turns out the code was never executed anyway. But he could have just passed NULL.
My favorite was a guy who used to contract at our company. He liked to write his code using variable names like tt (for Transaction Type), and pt (for Process Type, not Point). I happen to understand what he was writing as I somewhat knew the system he was working on, but what about another developer who was coming in fresh? They're not going to have a clue without asking, or a lot of time analyzing it. Even better, he liked to rewrite other people's code to fit in with his "better" design. There's nothing worse than someone "knows" they know better than you, but clearly doesn't.
Kyosa Jamie Nordmeyer - Taekwondo Yi (2nd) Dan Portland, Oregon, USA
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Daniel Ch. Bloch (MCSD, MCAD, MCTS) wrote:
Years ago, another developer told me about a special coding horror... he had an developer that falled in love and so he called for the next module all his variables with the name of his beloved... from Susi001 to Susixxx Now, try to read such a program ...
:laugh: In the really geeky days, I knew a guy who named all his vars after Star Trek characters. "Spock1", "Kirk42".
My personal favourite is from some old Foxpro code I saw which had a global variable called: OB1KNOBI (Obi-wan Kenobi...) (Only 8 chars long of course...) Some (very) old support utilities I have seen had swear words as variable names, which caused a couple of problems when an error occurs... A big DOS error box appears showing 'Variable "swear word" not found' !
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I've seen some good ones, but this has to be one of the best
MyCrapClassVector something_to_which_to_point;
He thought he had to declare this to pass a "dummy" ptr var to a method. Turns out the code was never executed anyway. But he could have just passed NULL.
Some years ago I had to convert a quickbasic program to VB6. The original developer had a variable called drol (for diameter of the roll). However in my (and his) native language, dutch, this also means turd.
Mark C Hagers New Media Ventures Amersfoort, the Netherlands
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An old favourite of mine was a piece of commercial software code I ran across in college. The programmer had a particular routine which was used to handle error exceptions, close any open files, etc. and terminate. He decided to mark the routine with the label HELL. Why? So that whenever he detected that something had gone wrong he could write GOTO...
Clive Pottinger Victoria, BC
modified on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 4:48:12 PM
Reminds me of a former co-worker who named all his programs POORLY. (I don't mean he chose bad names, I mean *each* of his programs had the same name ... POORLY.) I asked him why he did so. He replied that he liked it when he saw the computer display "COMPILING POORLY" when he submitted his programs....
;^)
'droid
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My favorite was a guy who used to contract at our company. He liked to write his code using variable names like tt (for Transaction Type), and pt (for Process Type, not Point). I happen to understand what he was writing as I somewhat knew the system he was working on, but what about another developer who was coming in fresh? They're not going to have a clue without asking, or a lot of time analyzing it. Even better, he liked to rewrite other people's code to fit in with his "better" design. There's nothing worse than someone "knows" they know better than you, but clearly doesn't.
Kyosa Jamie Nordmeyer - Taekwondo Yi (2nd) Dan Portland, Oregon, USA
Sounds like a clever chap to me.... My kind of plan.... Guarenteed employment for life (or the life of the software :) )