I’ve spent a severe period of time making an attempt to decipher what that particular person did. What on the earth have been they pondering? Who thought that 13 nested if statements have been a good suggestion? Who determined that 5 interlocking boolean situations ought to go into the fourth nesting of these statements? Hadn’t they heard of an explaining variable? What the heck does the literal worth 4 imply right here? 9280 traces is a bit a lot for a single process, don’t you assume?
So I shake my head, puzzle it out, and repair that bug. Or I wedge a brand new function into that thousands-of-lines-of-code process. And I marvel that the code nonetheless runs, nonetheless (principally) works, and nonetheless lives on.
Positive, all of us snicker on the loopy stuff builders did again then. But it surely happens to me that just a little humility is so as. To our trendy eye, which has the advantage of the knowledge of the previous few a long time, that code appears to be like horrible. However perhaps we simply didn’t know any higher again then.