Recent Representative Line

A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.

Jun 2012

Loose Cat Handling

by in Representative Line on

"I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into," Christian Riesen wrote, "the company I started at was very forthcoming about their codebase, and how it had grown organically over the past 12 years. I took the job because it would be a challenge to convert it from single files with tons of includes to a to a framework-based approach."

"One can ever expect the unexpected, and this job was no exception. Besides wonderful comments like 'we include this file here' (which is then followed by several include statements), there are many, many more weird things that defy any logic. Take, for example, this piece of code: