I've finally figured out how to express the mixture of horror and admiration I have for my predecessors home-brewed programming language, and the things he produced in it that actually work (usually, as long as you don't have to count over 126, have a line longer than 253 characters, or want it done quickly ( Read more... )

I sometimes explain my job to other programmers, to get sympathy. Or at least share the headaches.

ungratefulninja: so lemme see if I can divine what that code is doing in context
ungratefulninja: somewhere, there is a lookup table that turns certain characters into 0s, 1s, 2s, etc in the input stream
ungratefulninja: This code decides which character we saw, and the clever "branch on bits" ( Read more... )

My predecessor at my company designed his own programming language, and wrote all of the companies software in it. He wrote a small pamphlet of documentation on it, and screamed and threw things whenever the company tried to hire another programmer ( Read more... )