Coding Horror: Who Wrote This Crap?

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By bloid
via codinghorror.com
Published: Nov 08 2007 / 03:50

I first read this in the original 1993 edition of Code Complete. It's quoted from a much earlier book, Stan Kelley-Bootle's The Devil's Dp Dictionary, which was published in 1981. It's still true, more than 25 years later. There's a knee-jerk predisposition to look at code you didn't write, and for various reasons large and small, proclaim it absolute crap. But figuring out who's actually responsible for that crappy code takes some detective work.

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willcode4beer replied ago:

4 votes

Have you ever found some old code, and said the same ("who wrote this crap") and laughed at the poor design and structures, only later........

....you find out the author was yourself?

Justin Etheredge replied ago:

0 votes

Sadly I have probably done this more than once.

db9366 replied ago:

0 votes

This is just about an upcoming version of Visual Studio getting an annotate (a.k.a. "blame") feature. I'm surprised to hear that it's been missing this all these years.
,

kieronwilkinson replied ago:

0 votes

SVN has has blame for ages, CVS had blame forever, Intelli-J has visualised it since at least version 5, probably before (now on 7), and they are just getting this in VS now? Poor fools. I'm voting this down purely because this is not interesting in the serious programming world. ;-)