3 ms·

Ahh, yes. I'm not the world's worst programmer after all.

• shanelja 14y ago
  I spend so many days wondering if I'm a terrible programmer after looking at code I wrote only days before. I've slowly succumbed to the belief that it has more to do with daily personal growth than the iniquities of my past self.
  • gagege 14y ago
    I need to start seeing things that way. It's really hard, though, when I'm reading The Daily WTF and I go "that doesn't look so bad. I've written code similar to that". At least I can look at ideas I had 6 months ago and say now that that was a really stupid idea. Progress...
• randallsquared 14y ago
  For you to have drawn this conclusion here, it seems you must have decided that either Tommy Morgan or mgkimsal (or both), specifically, are worse programmers than you. ;)
  • mgkimsal 14y ago
    indeed, it might very well be me, although I've seen enough other stuff to make me think I'm not the worst. One of my fave WTFs was seeing a user profile table with 180 columns in it, one for each country - "is_us", "is_uk", "is_france", etc - with a y or n (or null) in each, and 180 hand-done queries in the login page to figure out what countries you lived in. I've never even come close to writing something that bad, but mostly because I'm lazy. Had that code even been in a loop, I'd have been less harsh on it.
    • gagege 14y ago
      That's crazy. One of the weirdest things I've seen was a column named POrN with a datatype of bit(SQL Server's equavalent of bool). We had no clue what it meant. We guessed maybe some lonely developer stuck that in there one evening long ago. Eventually, we discovered that it was actually P or N which stood for "positive or negative". It still didn't make much sense and needed to be renamed, but we got a good laugh out of it. I guess the original developer just didn't realize the association. The code was from India, so I'm sure English was not his first language.