28 May 02
In the last couple days, I dealt a lot with crappily written code that wasn’t my own crappily written code. One program was a C program (obviously written by a mathematician) that calculates the various elements of a Voronoi diagram. I cleaned it up and adjusted things to allow it to dynamically re-calculate the diagram based on a changed set of input data. The other stuff I dealt with was version 5.5 of phpNuke for phatplaya.com. That stuff isn’t quite as bad, but just different from the usual. Reading, understanding, and repairing someone else’s code forces you to think like they do for a minute, and possibly become a better programmer in the process. I suppose this only applies to turbo-nerds. Half of my reading audience (two people) will probably not have any idea what I’m talking about.