How to Write Unmaintainable Code (1999)

>4. Use acronyms to keep the code terse. Real men never define acronyms; they understand them genetically.

I'll see this and raise inherited SAS code where data sets in the process were named "AAA", "BBB", and so on. To prevent any kind of naming reason, even chronological, new data sets could adopt others' when the existing data set would no longer show up in the program. Which was so helpful when updates needed the previous data.

	▲	TimK65 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Back in 1997 I was assigned to convert a legacy SAS 5 application to SAS 6. Let's just say that the original programmer had adopted MANY of the techniques in the linked post. The first thing I did was to go through all the code and convert it to only have one statement per line. eye roll

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Panzerschrek 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Make all of your leaf classes final. After all, you're done with the project - certainly no one else could possibly improve on your work by extending your classes.

It's actually a good advice. A class not designed to be extendable should be marked as final.

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oniony 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Original: https://www.mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html

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downbad_ 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10237636

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mitchbob 13 hours ago | parent [-]

And

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34121624

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17781475

	▲	downbad_ 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks.

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miqkt 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ah, time to copy this into the custom instructions for an LLM to amuse myself with.

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seamossfet 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Honestly, it'd be really funny to try and make a CLAUDE.md file for slop maxxing.

	▲	Blackarea 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Could make that an AGENT.md and use a dumber model via opencode to slop maxx even harder!

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none2585 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One of my favorites to come back to periodically