This article is a good start, but missed out on the greatest fear of maintenance programmers - the deeply nested IF. If you can get to 25 layers of IFs with liberally interspersed DOs, Exits etc then the program becomes unfathomable. As you get to the 12th level of the IF the phone will ring and destroy your thinking path, causing you to helicopter out to start again.....and again... The maintenance programmer may even have to revert to Nassi Schneiderman charts, but unless they have access to A2 sheets they will be forced to stick together A4 sheets...(you now must ask yourself, When does this become cruel and inhuman?) I can state this with some authority as it happend to me 30 years ago and I am still getting over it...
This has made me giggle for about an hour. Especially as I'm just sort of starting out designing sites and had been debating whether to code my sites elegantly and clearly with perfect nesting, or whether to run it all together and make it ugly and aesthetically offensive so other people can't see what I'm doing.
7 comments:
This Website is brilliant :-)
But I think I'll first try to write good code and then start making it completly unusable :)
Absolutely brilliant .. I've laugh about one hour ..
The point here is .. REALLY IN FACT, code is written the way you describe here, generally speaking ..
Not .. 'unmaintenable' (difficult to very difficult to) .. but, beyond doubt, looking like 'some retard invention' :-) ..
Brilliant
Roberto
It'd be great if there was a printer friendly version of Unmaintainable Code article. Thanks.
To Anon. There's a partial copy of it here: http://freeworld.thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html
This article is a good start, but missed out on the greatest fear of maintenance programmers - the deeply nested IF.
If you can get to 25 layers of IFs with liberally interspersed DOs, Exits etc then the program becomes unfathomable. As you get to the 12th level of the IF the phone will ring and destroy your thinking path, causing you to helicopter out to start again.....and again...
The maintenance programmer may even have to revert to Nassi Schneiderman charts, but unless they have access to A2 sheets they will be forced to stick together A4 sheets...(you now must ask yourself, When does this become cruel and inhuman?)
I can state this with some authority as it happend to me 30 years ago and I am still getting over it...
This has made me giggle for about an hour. Especially as I'm just sort of starting out designing sites and had been debating whether to code my sites elegantly and clearly with perfect nesting, or whether to run it all together and make it ugly and aesthetically offensive so other people can't see what I'm doing.
Now soon I'm gonna write about 2011 very soon. BTW it is really interesting idea.
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