Instead of looking at bad code today, I think it'll be fun if we look at bad coders. Well, I mean, not at their pictures or anything, but look at their code. But not their bad code, just the code that makes 'em ... err ... bad. Ugh. My explanation obviously isn't working, so lets just dig right in ...

Brian found this while searching through a former developer's perl scripts. Their company runs a fairly important batch process very late at night that this particular coder was responsible for. As it turns out, "responsible" may not have been the appropriate word ...

--[Begin late.pl]------------- 
@titles = ("Up late...", 
  "Still watching stuff run",
  "Just letting you know...",
  "So you know...",
  "Still online",
  "Working late",
  "up early this morning");
@bodies = ("Hey guys, just letting you know that we are still up with the emailreports so I won't be early this morning.",
  "Just letting you know that we are watching the emails now, so we will be in the office a little later.",
  "Steve, I just finished watching the emails go out, and will be in the office as soon as I can this morning.",
  "Hey, just letting you know that the emails just went out, so I will not be there as scheduled in the morning.",
  "Steve, I know that you like to know when we are up later watching stuff, so just letting you know that we are.",
  "Up late watching stuff run, will be in as soon as possible in the morning.");
sendMail('[email protected]', '[email protected]', 
  @titles[rand($#titles)],  
	@bodies[rand($#bodies)]."\n\nThanks,\nJohn\n\n", 'Steve', 'John');
--[End   late.pl]-------------

And I thought I was slick using the Delay Send feature in Outlook. Then we have JT, who has been getting to know his predecessor more and more each time he opens up some of his code. Some of the more interesting findings ...

  • CodeToad
  • WhosYourDaddy(node) *This actually is the function to get the parent node
  • Census(node) *This it turned out returned all child nodes
  • disndat(dis, dat) * compares two objects
  • Seperate linked functions called like this RiceCrispies(Snap(Crackle(Pop() ) ) )
  • A very nice acsii image of trogdor
  • Incrementers named things like theInfamousI++
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