One of my first jobs, was as a maintenance engineer, on a 100KLoC+ codebase of 1979s-era FORTRAN IV.
No comments.
No subroutines (what we now call “functions”).
No variable name longer than 4 characters.
Fun. The most effective debug tool, was a Ouija board. It made me an expert WAGger.
It was the main reason that I am so anal about code Quality, these days. I never want to subject anyone else to that.
BTW: with today’s LLMs, there’s really no excuse for badly-documented, or badly-formatted code. You can write a thousand lines of commercial-grade spaghetti, and tell the LLM to format and document it.
No comments.
No subroutines (what we now call “functions”).
No variable name longer than 4 characters.
Fun. The most effective debug tool, was a Ouija board. It made me an expert WAGger.
It was the main reason that I am so anal about code Quality, these days. I never want to subject anyone else to that.
BTW: with today’s LLMs, there’s really no excuse for badly-documented, or badly-formatted code. You can write a thousand lines of commercial-grade spaghetti, and tell the LLM to format and document it.