[Pdx-pm] Ugly code!

[Daniel C. Stillwaggon]

On Wednesday, May 28, 2003, at 14:50 US/Pacific, Austin Schutz wrote:

> 	Just out of curiosity, what's the ugliest code you've ever seen in
> the wild (no names attached, to protect the guilty)?
> 	By ugly I mean stuff that is so bizarre and/or complicated with
> either no docs or misleading docs, not intentionally obfuscated stuff.
I'm currently working with a web-site that is of Lovecraftian 
proportions.  I can't
post any code (you all can feel free to thank me off list), but I had 
nightmares
after surveying what is there.  The site is roughly 30-40 separate 
scripts that
are interconnected in a bizarre web of evals and system calls that
boggles the mind (boggled mine at least, the index.html starts off the 
mess by
being a static page that is none-the-less a single virtual include...). 
  None of
the scripts seems to fully do any one task, and not a single one, or 
part of one,
is documented beyond the "Code Forest Code" level (i.e. "I am making 
sure
that this is uppercase" next to a 'uc').

I looked at the code for about half an hour before I recoiled in horror,
recommending an orbital nuking for the whole thing.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel C. Stillwaggon
<dstillwa at xprt.net>