Question

Most programmers will have had the experience of debugging/fixing someone else’s code. Sometimes that ‘someone else’s code’ is so obfuscated it’s bad enough trying to understand what it’s doing.

What’s the worst (most obfuscated) code you’ve had to debug/fix?

If you didn’t throw it away and recode it from scratch, well why didn’t you?

Answer 1

• a Java class
• only static methods that manipulates DOM
• 8000 LOCs
• long chain of methods that return null on ‘error’: a.b().c().d().e()
• very long methods (400/500 LOC each)

• nested if, while, like:

  if (...) {   for (...) {     if (...) {       if (...) {         while (...) {           if (...) {   

• cut-and-paste oriented programming

• no exceptions, all exceptions are catched and ‘handled’ using printStackTrace()
• no unit tests
• no documentation

I was tempted to throw away and recode… but, after 3 days of hard debugging, I’ve added the magic if 🙂