What's the most unsound program you've had to maintain? [closed]

Answer 1

What’s the most unsound program you’ve had to maintain?

Everything I've ever written!

Seriously. The more I read blogs, listen to podcasts, and follow sites like this, the more I learn every day. And every day I basically realize everything I wrote yesterday is wrong in some way. I feel for the poor saps that are maintaining the things I wrote early in my career.

Answer 2

Maintaining ASP applications for a specific company who hires developers to maintain their previous hires... All these applications are not documented, neither there are any comments.

Every function is copied and pasted in every ASP page. So no functions are defined or whatsoever... Every day I'm crippled by their environments, because I have first to remote to a server, to bypass the DMZ. After that I have to remote in to a production server where I have to make the changes.

Answer 3

I once tried to write an MP3 decoder. It didn't work.

Answer 4

I once had to maintain a legacy C application which had previously been written and maintained by some programmers who had lost the will to program (and possibly live). It had too many WTFs to mention, but I do remember a boolean function which under various special cases would return TRUE+1, TRUE+2, etc.

Then I read Roedy Green's essay and laughed a lot, until I realised that the reason I found it funny was that I recognised most of the examples from the code I was maintaining. (That essay has become a bit bloated over years of additions, but it's still worth a look.)

Answer 5

Anything I've ever written that's originally supposed to be a quick prototype and ends up staying around a while. My problem domain requires a lot of throwaway prototyping by its nature. For these prototypes, it's sometimes reasonable to violate every best practice and rule of good style, just get it done and clean up later if the prototype ends up being worth keeping. However, occasionally these prototypes end up being very difficult to get working properly, but then end up being keepers. In these cases, I usually end up putting off refactoring/rewriting the thing indefinitely because I'm afraid I'll never get it working again. Further lessening my motivation is that my boss is a domain expert who doesn't program at all.

Answer 6

I'm maintaining a scheduling web-application we use in our intranet. When I've been asked if I could remove an agent from the scheduler I thought, sure why not. When I took a look into the source code I figured out that every hour of this agent's day was coded separately. So was every day of his week. And so was every week of every agent of this region. And so was every region of about 5 regions. Html fies that hold asp-code all over the place.

One day I took some time to guess how many lines of code are in these various files and I estimated about 300000. Three-hundred thousand lines of code of once handwritten and then copy and pasted code.

But this number convinced my manager pretty quickly that we would need a new scheduling app very quickly.