See Progress Wheel, See Progress Wheel Spin
One of the best bits of sarcastic comedy I've ever read can be found at http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~susan/475/unmain.html, except you pretty much need to be a computer programmer to get it.
Its suggestion #1 for unmaintainable code is "lie in the comments". Where I work we have a subtle twist on that called "lie with your method/function names". One of today's joys was the discovery of the true nature of a method called "layoutButtons". This name has user interface implications which, on iOS, made the fact that it was running on the main thread seem quite reasonable. Sometimes, though, the main thread would hang -- a very bad thing -- because sometimes (if a cache was invalid) "layoutButtons" called twelve layers deep into code that made *network requests*. One just does not expect graphics updates to run at the speed of socket timeouts.
Its suggestion #1 for unmaintainable code is "lie in the comments". Where I work we have a subtle twist on that called "lie with your method/function names". One of today's joys was the discovery of the true nature of a method called "layoutButtons". This name has user interface implications which, on iOS, made the fact that it was running on the main thread seem quite reasonable. Sometimes, though, the main thread would hang -- a very bad thing -- because sometimes (if a cache was invalid) "layoutButtons" called twelve layers deep into code that made *network requests*. One just does not expect graphics updates to run at the speed of socket timeouts.