THIS IS PUREAli was what they like to call "Purist". You know the type by now: the man who's never met a piece of Java code that didn't need a refactor for the sake of "style". Too bad for him he was assigned to work on some code that had been ported to Java from other languages. It worked, but it wasn't Pure.

Nor was he sensitive to budget constraints or scheduling issues. On one fateful Friday afternoon, he couldn't take the impurity any longer. Over the course of around 6 hours, he committed dozens of minor revisions to source control, touching nearly every file in the codebase:

Revision Author Message
2345 Ali Replacing underscores with mixed case function names, as per Java standards.
2346 Ali Renamed function today() to now(), to better document the functionality of the code.
2347 Ali Replacing spaces with tabs, as per Java standards.
2348 Ali More replacement of spaces with tabs, as per Java standards.
2349 Ali Removed spaces at the ends of lines, as per Java standards.
2350 Ali Renamed unclear variables trigger_nm and table_nm to trigger and table.
2351 Ali Variable names MUST begin with a lowercase, as per Java standards.
2352 Ali Constants declared with final MUST be all uppercase, as per Java standards.
2353 Ali Alphabetized table listing, for readability.
2354 Ali Mass correction of indentation using Eclipse, as per Java standards.
2355 Ali Alphabetized function listing, as per Java standards.

The real kicker? The code didn't work anymore. Not only did he accidentally erase some crucial lines, but see commit 2353? That was the database creation script. Instead of creating tables in the sensible order that they depended on each other, instead, they were being created with invalid foreign key restraints but in perfectly alphabetical order. Couple that with deleting the backup in an attempt to save disk space and you have some very pissed off coworkers pulling a weekend shift to repair the testing environment.

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