Nope, it’s not that my team’s code is horrible and I’ve decided to wrap up a post to complain. Actually the code in the project I work for is quite good. We’re following Agile metodologies (a mix of UnifiedProcess and Scrum) and this gives great freedom to developers to concentrate in creating good code, plus eliminates part of the meetings we developers hate (I hope to be able to get a good post about the process some point later this summer, after I’ve experienced it a little more)
The post title comes from this link, which has given me 45 minutes of laughing recognizing real-life situations in code. Consider it as the programmer’s version of the BOFH
My favourite excerpt up to now:
Obscure film references
: Use constant names like LancelotsFavouriteColour instead of blue and assign it hex value of 0×0204FB. The color looks identical to pure blue on the screen, and a maintenance programmer would have to work out 0204FB (or use some graphic tool) to know what it looks like. Only someone intimately familiar with Monty Python and the Holy Grail would know that Lancelot’s favorite color was blue. If a maintenance programmer can’t quote entire Monty Python movies from memory, he or she has no business being a programmer.
: Use constant names like LancelotsFavouriteColour instead of blue and assign it hex value of 0×0204FB. The color looks identical to pure blue on the screen, and a maintenance programmer would have to work out 0204FB (or use some graphic tool) to know what it looks like. Only someone intimately familiar with Monty Python and the Holy Grail would know that Lancelot’s favorite color was blue. If a maintenance programmer can’t quote entire Monty Python movies from memory, he or she has no business being a programmer.
I must now spread the wisdom from the unmaintainable code to my coding friends, who can appreciate it, and I don’t have non-coding friends :P.