There's nothing a programmer fears so much as inheriting unintelligible code.

For the last five years, I've worked nearly exclusively on programs that I wrote from scratch. Now I face the task of extending someone else's program, and I can only hope that it doesn't prove a nightmare. It's begun very inauspiciously: the first file I opened has variables named "crap" and "crap2".

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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."

That's pretty special right there.

Hopefully, you won't have to go through anything where the entire file is written on one line of code.
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"A period"
~~This is what I like to add to the end of almost every sentence.~~

Yay, there are magic numbers everywhere, and the program implements its own idiosyncratic system for cascading parameters.

From: ShadowSpy | Posted: 6/24/2010 11:06:26 AM | #003

Hopefully, you won't have to go through anything where the entire file is written on one line of code.

It's not quite that bad:

[traj,mp,p]=findDotTrajSin('p',p,'ntrials',ntrials,'Xmax',ScreenSize(3),'Ymax',ScreenSize(4),'name',name);

Screen('DrawTexture',window,tex,[],[(traj(1,idx,kdx)-Gx/2) (traj(2,idx,kdx)-Gy/2) (traj(1,idx,kdx)+Gx/2) (traj(2,idx,kdx)+Gy/2)]) % draw target

There are lots of encouraging comments, too:

"WHAT TO DO HERE? WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT?"
"NOTE, THIS PART IS BASED ON SPECIFIC VALUES OF Occ2P FROM SET PARAMS... DANGER DANGER DANGER"
"AGAIN, WHAT TO DO HERE...?"

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"If I pick nine, you'd better not be racist against me!"
"No promises, niney."