"When I was first exposed to this reality, some friends on the nearby Microsoft Word team shared stories about their app's own scary basement: a routine called

"When I was first exposed to this reality, some friends on the nearby Microsoft Word team shared stories about their app's own scary basement: a routine called FormatLine. Given a point in a document and a column width, FormatLine would lay out the next line of text at that point. As I heard it, this routine had evolved into a handful of functions that were each thousands of lines long. Developers assigned to descend into the depths of FormatLine were treated with the same respect and concern as spelunkers attempting to reach trapped miners." This paragraph is hilarious and horrifying all rolled into one. That is not my idea of a fun project.