Re: TIMTOWTDI meets Rube Goldberg

[jdporter]

I once worked with a guy who was a tester but knew just enough sh and perl to be dangerous. He knew some, but not all, of the basic array operations. He didn't know push. To achieve the effect of push, he used the following code snippet:

open F, ">tmpfile";
print F @array;
print F "$one_more\n";
close F;
open F, "<tmpfile";
@array = F;
close F;

(I think he lived with always having newlines on the end of his array elements.)

To make matters worse, he did not know about subroutines; he copy-and-pasted the above snippet everywhere he needed to push onto an array.

wtf!

[chromatic]

I've seen that before, but not in Perl. It's horrifying.