Maybe you guys can laugh at this... I still cannot.

[Herbie Mountjoy]

It wasn't me. Signed The Murderer.

I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.

[glennPattonWork3]

I have done the same thing (many times...) my worst was sending out an exe to a client (that was built on a test version I wrote) that displayed a message box with an red X on it and the message "Destroy All Humans"... phone call later in the day to my line "Hi Glenn, software works great that new fix you came up with, great. Get rid of the message box and it can go", "What message box..." and on! :-O

[Gary Wheeler]

Excellent riposte, as it were.

Software Zen: delete this;

[grralph1]

Of course it is funny as it has come to bite you back. Sometimes an ugly hack is necessary. Given time restraints etc. We may laugh when an ugly hack is accomplished and it appears to work, but we never laugh when we have to revisit and fix or tidy it.... but then we laugh again when it is fixed. We all do it. If some poor other coder got the job you wouldn't have even known about it. What if someone posted a rant about it on CP and you realised that it was your comment in your code. I wouldn't laugh then either but at least the comment was honest and apologetic and I would have understood, but I wouldn't laugh. I tell a lie, I would laugh. Just a quick little laugh and then I would be indignant and self righteous about it.

"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." Frank Zappa 1980

[Dan Neely]

Sometimes I laugh to hold away the tears.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt

[Dan Neely]

Yup. I've got hate lists for all my long running projects with bits of ugly/confusing/unmodifiable/badly designed code that needs rewritten at some point. Occasionally I even have a week to scratch an item off the list.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt

[Alexander DiMauro]

This is why you should change jobs every few years...to avoid having to fix any of your old code! :-D Have a :beer: and laugh it off! :laugh:

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone - Bjarne Stroustrup The world is going to laugh at you anyway, might as well crack the 1st joke! My code has no bugs, it runs exactly as it was written.

[Sharon Freas]

Judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. :) You did the best you could at the time. Now you have better ideas. It's a sign of growth. :-D

[etkid84]

from an apparently honest guy :thumbsup:

David

[mgoad99]

Actually, an honest gal. Well, maybe or maybe not honest... but definetly a gal. :)

[etkid84]

oops, my bad :doh:

David

[RafagaX]

Well, the future wasn't as far you thought, wasn't it? :laugh: ;P

CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...

[bkebamc]

This is the voice of GOD speaking: Have you grep'd your code for "ugly hack"?

[rjmoses]

I once took over maintenance of a 40,000 line, assembly language program which had only one comment: "Be prepared with bottle in hand when working on this program." Bottle didn't help, but I didn't care either.

[BrainiacV]

Joe Woodbury wrote:

(Then there's the time I started rewriting a confusing class of mine only to hit a blocking problem three days in and only then remembering I'd been there before. I rolled back my changes and put in a comment warning me to stop trying to rewrite the class.)

Reminds me of the time I wrote this routine to search some structure. As I got into it, I realized the intuitive manner I was writing it was going to lead to a dead end and I rewrote it in a counter-intuitive manner that worked. I was in a time crunch and another programmer offered to help and so I said I needed a copy of the routine, but addressing another structure, so could he just make the reference changes (Yes, I should have written it in a more flexible form, but that would have taken longer and I believe at the time I thought I only needed it once). At end of day he gave me the code and then split, I looked at the source and saw that he had not done what I had asked, but had tried to write it in the intuitive manner that I knew looked good, but was not going to work. (sigh) So I pulled an all-nighter to re-do it correctly since I was on a plane flight the next day to install it.

Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.

[KP Lee]

BrainiacV wrote:

he had not done what I had asked, but had tried to write it in the intuitive manner that I knew looked good, but was not going to work.

I blame this on SDETS, if they didn't exist, the programmer would have to test his own code. Hopefully without the blind spot that bypasses the path that will fail. (I at times am an SDET and just have to shake my head at some of the garbage that gets sent for testing. So this is my fault for agreeing to this work.) Reminds me of a bug where I wrote something like "It makes absolutely no sense to allow this field to be nullable, but since it is, fix your code to fail gracefully when it is null." Ah, the joys of writing new code to integrate with legacy code.

[BrainiacV]

KP Lee wrote:

the programmer would have to test his own code

That reminds me of another horror story. The team I was with worked under my Former Bitch Supervisor from Helltm and we were under deadline. A coworker announced he is going to take some vacation time and my module was dependent on code he was working on. He gave me a copy late in the day, says he had tested it, and disappears for two weeks. The next day I drop it into my code and it GPFs immediately. I start looking into the code and find the most crapped up mess I had ever seen outside of the POS we were working on to clean up. (He could have been on the original team for all the similarity) I took a machete to it and reduced it to 1/3rd of the original size. It was obvious he had gotten lost in all his redundancies. It was also obvious I was not going to make the schedule because I not only had to work on my code, but I had to rewrite his. I normally would have tried to cover for him, but the FBSfH was having none of it. In the end, I left only one subroutine intact. A) because it was the only one that worked and B) I wanted something to point to to indicate his normal coding style. What did the subroutine do? It centered a string to be displayed on an 80 column screen. How did he do that? Instead of subtracting the length of the string from 80 and then dividing the remainder by 2 to determine the number of leading spaces to print before the string, he instead created a buffer of 80 characters that he filled with spaces. And then at the beginning of the buffer, he inserted the string. He then counted the spaces from the beginning of the line and then counted the spaces from the end of the line and compared the counts. If the count in front was less than the count in back, he'd move the entire buffer one space over and add a space to the front....and start counting again. Such methodology had to be preserved, damn the lost cycles. :doh: So when he came back from vacation, I brought him into my cube and showed him what I had done to his code. When I displayed the code, he said, "Yeah, that's my code." I couldn't believe he didn't see the differences. So I explained how our peerless leader was pissed and when he saw her later that day that he had better take a tube of KY jelly with him because she was going to ream him royally.

Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those w

[KP Lee]

LMAF So, how did he fit a 132 character string on the 80 character screen? What if the string had leading or trailing blanks? Reminds me of a challenge to print 9 lines. Wrote a routine to write up to 197 lines:

    /// /// Goes from 1 to 99, lists on Console the number incremented forward and backwards
    /// Right adjusting the values. All values except the last number are repeated in reverse order
    /// IE if 5 is passed "123454321" is fifth line, 9 lines total listed
    /// 
    /// The largest middle number
    static void stringlist(int num)
    {
        if (num < 0) num = -num;
        if (num < 2)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("1");
            return;
        }
        if (num > 99)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Passed number ({0}) exceeds 99, setting to 99", num);
            num = 99;
        }
        List forward = new List();
        StringBuilder left = new StringBuilder(), right = new StringBuilder(), pad = new StringBuilder();
        int len = 0;
        for (int i = 1; i <= num; i++)
        {
            pad.Append("    ");
            left.Append(i);
            string x = left.ToString() + right.ToString();
            forward.Add(x);
            len = x.Length;
            right.Insert(0, i);
        }
        foreach (string x in forward)
            if (x.Length == len) Console.WriteLine(x);
            else Console.WriteLine("{0}{1}", pad.ToString(0, len - x.Length), x);
        for (int i = forward.Count - 2; i > -1; i--)//-2 points to the next to last number
            Console.WriteLine("{0}{1}", pad.ToString(0, len - forward\[i\].Length), forward\[i\]);
    }

So, how would you grade my coding? OK, OK, so I put one ineffiecient line in that I decided to keep in. Anything else you would complain about it?

[jhfw58]

Thanks for sharing this one, I had a really good laugh and he who has never used an ugly hack shall throw the first stone...;-) By the way it reminds me of the old programmer's joke where someone sifts through innumerable lines of very old, very badly written code and the only comment line he ever finds reads:"This is where the tricky part begins"

[BrainiacV]

KP Lee wrote:

So, how would you grade my coding?

My number 1 rule for grading code is..."Does it work?" After that, I normally don't care how many clock cycles you are chewing up unless it makes the code unusable. Readability only becomes an issue when you have to go into the code to fix it or make changes. But let me relate another story where I had instructed one of my minions to make a minor change to a program and he complained that it would require duplicating this entire screen of code to insert a space in the output. "Unless you know a better way." which is what he used to say to his previous manager. Unfortunately, I did. It took a few minutes of playing in immediate mode, but I wrote an equivalent subroutine in only three lines of code. (which ended up being more robust than his POS) He came around and while he'd still try using that line on me, this time around he was asking for help instead of trying to avoid work. But a classic case of code collapsing (as I call it) was when I was taking a class in PL/1 and the assignment was to detect the number of words on an 80 column line of text. Having just come from a life of GOTO programming. I wanted to embrace structured code and had elaborate code to deal with the special cases of words beginning the line and words at the end of the line. All the rest would be bounded by spaces. As I rolled the listing into a wide carriage typewriter to add comments to the code (otherwise I'd have to repunch the deck of cards and submit the deck to operations and wait whatever was the prevailing turnaround time) I reexamined my logic to explain what the code was doing and in doing so realized that I could have made the code vastly simpler if I had moved the supplied 80 column card image into a buffer with 82 characters with a space in the front and a space in the back. I added comments at the end of the listing stating that and I believe as a consquence I got a very good grade for my solution.

Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.