1's and 0's

Then you will become indispensable. Managers will never know if your code is unmaintainable because software you wrote is inherently complicated or because you are an "awesome" programmer. New coders hired to maintain your codebase will admit failure quickly, or propose costly "total rewrites", so it becomes cheaper to keep you around.

Sadly, all this from experience on the receiving end. We ended up throwing away similar code and firing original developers, but we spent ungodly amounts of time at meetings first.

It also contains support for everything else from AJAX to the kitchen sink, since it originates with several independent (and competing) OS/programming-language/database systems, originating in the late '60s before worse-is-better ate everyone's lunch. It even works as a RAD environment (plus a webserver, an SQL database, an OO programming language, and a go-between for other systems' incompatible message formats): very unusual (I expect the kitchen-sink module, or perhaps the mail reader, in the next version), but not primitive.

Its reputation is sullied by some WTF-worthy users, and by old coding conventions (now less completely abandoned than they should be) that were like Perl but hard to understand.

Full disclosure: I work for Intersystems, but not in Sales, and this post is purely on my own initiative. (One does not pay people to make unflattering comparisons with Perl.)

From the system I maintain:

  /*
 e - ExternalStatus
 i - InternalStatus

          e\i  |   D    F     N   X
          --------------------------
          D    |   A    B     C   D
          F    |   E    F     G   H 
          N    |   I    J     K   L
          X    |   M    N     O   P 

  switch( $inst->Status ) {
   case 'A' : 	case 'D' : case 'M' :
    $stats['d']++; break;
   case 'E' : case 'F' : case 'G' : case 'H' :
   case 'B' : case 'J' : case 'N' :
    $stats['f']++; $stats['d']++; break;
   default : $stats['n']++;
  }

Still deserves death, though