> Matt Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, said he has looked at the GnuPG source code and found it in such rough shape

> Matt Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, said he has looked at the GnuPG source code and found it in such rough shape that he regularly assigns chunks of it to his students for review. "At the end I ask how they felt about it and they all basically say: 'God, please I never want to do something like this again,'" Reading that reminded me of some comments[1] made by the author of ObjectivePGP, a very recent effort to create an OpenPGP compatible Objective-C library: > Today I regret that I have not made any notes during programming, so that I could now quote all my moments or doubt, all WTF? instances (I think that some of them are still present in source comments). Many sudden turns of events, lots of dead ends and a massive amount of uncertainty await for the person implementing this protocol. Now I understand why OpenPGP does not have many implementations — the protocol itself is simply quite difficult to implement. and > Now, with all I have learned during the time I spent working on it, I would have written the library in an entirely different way. ... I have even made a note in my TODO “Need to rewrite the whole thing!”. This is true, but if I keep on rewriting it all the time, I will not finish anything else. [1] http://blog.krzyzanowskim.com/2014/07/31/short-story-about-openpgp-for-ios-and-os-x-objectivepgp/ http://blog.krzyzanowskim.com/2014/07/31/short-story-about-o...