Some interesing articles about programming everyday life

Real programmers don't use Pascal

http://guest.engelschall.com/~sb/realmen/

contains several amusing phrases like:
Today's college graduates are soft-protected from the realities of programming by source level debuggers, text editors that count parentheses and user-friendly operating systems.

Bad response time doesn't bother the Real Programmer: It gives him a chance to catch a little sleep between compiles.

...and many more... :) worth a look (for ongoing Computer Scientists..)


How to write unmaintainable Code

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html

Even funnier... Somehow useful, because you get to know, what you might actually not should do :)

In naming functions and variables, make heavy use of abstract words like it, everything, data, handle, stuff, do, routine, perform and the digits e.g. routineX48, PerformDataFunction, DoIt, HandleStuff and do_args_method.

Hungarian Notation is the tactical nuclear weapon of source code obfuscation techniques;

Use constant names like LancelotsFavouriteColour instead of blue

You see why you should never use concrete examples? They are too clear. [...] After all, no academic would be caught dead giving an example. People only respect that which is too abstract to grasp easily.

Make sure that every method does a little bit more (or less) than its name suggests. As a simple example, a method named isValid(x) should as a side effect convert x to binary and store the result in a database.

Insist on carrying outright orthogonal information in your Hungarian warts. Consider this real world example: "a_crszkvc30LastNameCol". It took a team of maintenance engineers nearly 3 days to figure out that this whopper variable name described a const, reference, function argument that was holding information from a database column of type Varchar[30] named "LastName" which was part of the table’s primary key

The Netscape colours are all carefully named. For example papayawhip is 0xffefd5. Just to keep them on their toes, define a papayawhip colour constant as 0xff00ff, a garish magenta. Have fun making up obscure colour names like algae = 0x556b2f instead of darkolivegreen. Very few people know what colour puce and teal are, but would never admit it. Exploit that.

Enough of computer related brain teaser distraction, and back to work! That thesis doesn't write it on it's own, only one week remaining till examinations will start...