This is probably not going to please you but I've seen worse than this. In production, at companies with big names. Programmers in isolation (no oversight or capable peers) will do the most terrible things.

And on a more positive note: he did write that code, is looking for help from people more capable and eventually will likely figure it out. Check back in a decade or so how he's doing, likely you'll be surprised. Writing terrible code and learning from it is a lot better than not writing code at all.

It's easy enough to forget that at some point in time we were all clueless newbies.