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> It's just that you get a lot of "coding is a thing I have to do in order to get to some target", and so people think that once they've finally bashed out their spreadsheet, they've figured it all out.

I have a friend who wrote a 641-line long bash script to automate a web site. It doesn't use subroutines anywhere, the body for the program is a 550 line long loop with multiple if statements and loops inside it.

He thinks the program is maintainable and easy to understand because he didn't have particular difficulty writing it.



Wha......

What??

What school or book did he read that made him think that was a good idea?


He attended the school of self-reliance. He should be applauded for tackling the challenge and doing the job himself, where otherwise it would likely have not been done at all.

Obviously, he's not a programmer. The script, for us, is bad. Perhaps if something important for him depends on this script working, he should pay a software developer to spend some time cleaning it up.


> He should be applauded for tackling the challenge and doing the job himself

Indeed. it was a hobby project of his.


Could be worse. Could be a 641 line perl script.


Could be worse. Could be a one line Perl script.


He's entirely self taught. He's not stupid or anything, it's just that he hasn't had the experience of maintaining large codebases, attempting to modify his unmaintainable code or attempting to modify other people's unmaintainable code.




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