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I good developer knows how to write readable code (and still keep it efficient).

Sadly not all developers can be bothered to do so and if they've used nondescript variable / functions names as well as weird developer logic, then the code might as well have been deliberately obfuscated.

I've worked on plenty of projects where debugging other peoples code worked out just as time consuming than if I had rewritten the code from scratch. Albeit we're talking smallish projects in those instances.


I love finding humour comments in other peoples code (comments I'd forgotten about in my own code).

I remember once stumbling across the following within one of Oracle's own APIs for Java / Oracle RMDBS Forms: "This is a terrible kludge". It pretty much summed up the entire product in one line hehe

Edited 2012-12-19 00:24 UTC

I once had to maintain an old VB6 app, which had features such as a Sub that traversed 12 pages! If that wasn't enough the original dev used the same handful of (badly named) variables all the way through this epic subroutine for different purposes!

But back to the comment thing; this same dev would insist on adding a comment every third or fourth line, for no reason at all that I could fathom. Highlights included things like:

and my personal favourite:



He would also always (and I mean always) end every Function and Sub with:



When I find him, there will be blood.

From personal experience, even good devs who have a pretty good idea of what good code looks like can write pretty unreadable code if they are...

1/Coding under strong time constraints, a burst of inspiration, or something else that puts their minds' focus elsewhere.
2/Not able to notice the mess left around until they try to read through it again after a few months without touching it.

The human brain's content indexing abilities are truly a thing of magic, but they become a hindrance when you try to distinguish what's clean from what isn't.


These clever snippets become much less funny when you try to figure out what the code actually does, though

Edited 2012-12-19 08:09 UTC

I don't have to look at this link - Raymond Chen. You realise who he is? I think that if he couldn't work it out, it was pretty convoluted and badly written code. Personally, I'd rate his opinion over yours about 1000 fold.

An from reading the article comments, the code was originally written in Pentium-optimized assembly (oh, the days of U/V pipe dreams), and later backported to C (probably with any comments removed?) Good luck trying to maintain that