Spell Checker

Here is an email I received in response to my essay on how to write unmaintainable code. My responses are marked with a ∇ and green type.

Spell Checker : Jack Swindell : jack.swindell@gmail.com : 2009-03-23

I dearly love the How to write unmaintainable code page that you released tongue in cheek some time ago. I have a modest variation on naming (maybe it’s there, but how can someone excel at doing poor maintenance if they thoroughly read and comprehend all of the comments…). My favorite el-yukko was to find out the maximum length supported for names, and then after writing the code so that it actually works, create a custom spell checker dictionary that corrects each of the names to long mixtures of zeros and capital O characters. Because they usually have a slightly different width on screen, it evens gives the most false hope that one can actually remember the difference — not!

Example: TheFiniteIntegrationThingy becomes 00O0OOO0OO0OOOOO00OO0OOOO

Coding using KOI8 instead of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is fun especially when the project has nothing to do with Russian. Then again, I miss my old Anderson Jacobson modified Selectric with its Olde English type ball that I always used for assembly language listings…

:-)

Tip of the day: Always write self modifying code, and if the processor prevents it, then write an obscure token interpreter so that your code can modify the tokens.

You are unusually inventive, though I think you tip your hand and could easily be convicted of malice. Ideally, those reading your code should presume incompetence.

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