Programmer Humor

Those are rookie numbers. We got functions with 5000+ lines and 20 levels of indentation directly in the user-interaction event handlers :)

"Documenting the code base will be your first task for the next month to help show us how well you understand the codebase."

Those are amateur problems, real problems start when you are unable to run it or you don't have source code. Bonus, it's written in the in house language made by developer who left job or died - true story.

This is the dram. Since the entire codebase is shit, you basically have to rewrite it basically in its entirety.

Which means you can do it with an actual good design.

And if you mess up on something, you have a working version you can consult.

every programmer I've seen who says their code is self documenting writes dogshit code

Well, I’m the only maintainer for my project, so ha! (I only have myself to blame.)

The team lead has spend the last two months writing a permissions library that nobody understands how to use or debug. He wrote it with Cthulhu at his side. Soon not even Cthulhu will understand it.

Yeah, that was a fun job... at least the database tended to have some descriptive column names. They never lined up with the entity they mapped to, but it was better than nothing.

JavaScript developer in a strongly typed language decoding json into dictionaries with single letter keys.

I can live without documentation and comments, but then you've got to write really well-structured, self-documenting code. Which means long variable names (or better: local constants) that describe exactly what's in them, and function names that describe clearly what the function is for, and readable code that shows what it does.

But perhaps expecting that kind of discipline from people who lack the discipline to write documentation, was not entirely realistic.

Allow me to introduce a shit ton of jQuery into all the jsp files you got.

A few years ago I had to port a tool from HTBasic (a proprietary BASIC dialect) to Python. The original source only runs in their proprietary IDE. Of course, no comments whatsoever and a lot of GOTO magic and matrice calculations some of which have no other purpose as to confuse the reader. The variables had only cryptic and meaningless three digit letters. My theory is that they intentionally wrote it in a way that it would be a nightmare to reverse engineer. And they succeeded.