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> it's always a hacked-together mess from an engineer who's likely no longer with the company.

Oh man, in 1996 I was at Nortel. Some Ms. C. in Computer Science (no longer with the company) left behind Perl cruft whose indentation levels didn't even match up:

   whatever
   { 

  }
type of thing. He didn't know how to operate a programmer's text editor.


The Broken Windows Theory may be bullshit when it comes to criminology, but I truly believe it applies to code.

I've seen a lot of negligently written code with broken windows on the surface, that deep down turns out to be criminally insane.

If somebody's doesn't give a shit enough to indent their code, they usually don't give a shit enough to design it either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory




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