Have you ever written code no one could understand?

2 pointsneilk3 comments

Followup from the other thread about inheriting incomprehensible codebases. It's easy to be self-righteous about the poor programming practices of those who came before us, but maybe a little confession would be good too.

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I had to encode a factory's shift schedule. I noticed that it repeated in a regular way with each month. Then I noticed that there was yet another, more subtle symmetry in between weeks, so I encoded that too. Then I realized the remaining pattern was a simple wavy line, so I replaced that part with a function based on a sine wave with the appropriate amplitude and period.

In my defense, I was 16.

Abstractions strike again!

I’ve written code that I can’t understand:

"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else." - Eagleson's law

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