note
blue_cowdawg
<h1>ARRRGH! SPAGHETTI CODE FOR DINNER AGAIN!</h1>
<p>
I've seen more spaghetti code in my lifetime than I'd care
to admit to. Mostly out of embarrasment for the authors
who left it behind for me to find and in a couple of
cases (I'll confess) out of embarrasment for finding some
that I wrote years after I wrote it.
</p>
<h2>The obligatory anecdotes</h2>
<p>One fellow, whose name will not be mentioned to
protect a friend, whom I owe a great debt of gratitude for
pushing me in the right direction when I was a newbie to
the world of *nix and helped learn when I was starting
in that brave new world, also bequeathed to me a project
that he was working on that was a prime example of
spaghetti code at its best.
</p>
<p>He wrote this wonderful application that consisted of
Pascal code that called shell scripts (!) that were strung
together via pipes invoking a mix of C language programs
and Fortran programs with some <b>bc</b> thrown in for
good measure. Some munging of text was also done by awk
in between and a wide assortment of temporary files
littering the disc, some of which were never cleaned up
after.
</p>
<p>Did I mention I was a newbie at this point in my
career?</p.
<p>After he left the company that he and I worked at
together, "Luke", our boss at the time (well,
mine now, not his) walked into my cubicle and announced
to me that I now had to work on the project my mentor
left behind.</p>
<p>From those humble beginnings I went from barely being
able to compile a "hello world" C program on
Unix (HPUX 1.0 if you want to know) to now learning the
myriad world of programming in a Unix environment including
sorting out the several dozen make files that made up
this wonderful project and figuring on what pieces to keep
and what to re-write. It was one hell of a learning
experience</p>
<p>Fast forward a bunch of years and I am an adjunct
professor at a college in NYC. I give out programming
assignments to my students and some of the results I get
back are nice clean code and others, you guessed it,
resemble a plate of pasta.
</p>
<p>It must be noted that I did notice a correlation
between the students who wrote nice crisp code and had
wonderfully organized notes and took an organized
approach to problem solving and those who wrote spaghetti
code and were more random in their general style
of doing things.
</p>
<hr>
<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-72516">
Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional<br>
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg<br>
</div></div>
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