re: #303 A Cranky One

I once worked closely with a brilliant coder whose code was amazingly concise, compiled tiny and ran super fast, but was often impossible to understand. For giggles I’d take some samples of his code to people with decades of coding experience and ask them what the code does. Usually got blank stares after a careful examination. Heck, in the time we worked together he wrote a bug report on the compiler; after it was fixed, we recovered significant real-time resources.

To your previous comment, his code was usually poorly documented and when there were comments, they were things like “This section explains why a raven is like a writing desk.”

Sigh.

That reminds me of the legendary comment in the Unix system 6 sources. Deep in the guts of the memory management system was a call that first saved a system context and then swapped it out in a horribly written manner. The comment attempts to explain the mess than gives up, metaphorically throwing it’s arms up in defeat saying “You are not expected to understand this.”