It's not nonsense. The reason of saying "You are not expected to understand this" is not because the developer is arrogant or the code is unmaintainable, but si

It's not nonsense. The reason of saying "You are not expected to understand this" is not because the developer is arrogant or the code is unmaintainable, but simply because it was a temporary and PDP-11 specific hack, which relied on an implementation detail the compiler - one doesn't learn much trying to understand it, the article says "[...] On the PDP that was true, but on other systems it was not. So they fixed it to work and removed the famous comment". Also, recall that Unix, at this stage, is still largely an experimental operating system, these hacks are totally normal. > I often feel ashamed of software engineering Agree. There are many examples of how software development is unable to constantly deliver predictable results, and how software development has yet to become "engineering". But this is not one of them.