On Friday 18 February 2005 12:28 pm, Bill Warner wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-02-18 at 10:46 -0700, Eric "Shubes" wrote:
> > your kernels vmlinuz-$version. You can name them anything you like --
> > kernel-mustard, kernel-panic, kernel-of-truth, fred-and-ginger ...
> > anything at all."
>
> If anyone else is going to use that system please don't start nameing
> them off the wall things.  I worked with a guy that wrote a big admin
> script that managed profiles and logins for a system with over 900
> telnet'd users.  Every variable in the entire script was $ALAN1, $ALAN2,
> $ALAN3, $ALAN4, $ALAN5, etc... up to about $ALAN80  He wanted to ask me
> a quick scripting question and I took a look at the script and almost
> strangled him on the spot.

Yes, well that goes well beyond just scripts.  The very first programming job 
I had was to figure why this particular program wasn't properly dialing up a 
central server over a modem and, once I found out why, I was to fix it.  
Simple enough... until I actually looked at the code.

To give the previous programmer credit, the code was copiously commented and 
had lots of descriptive variables names, I think.  Unfortunately, all of the 
comments and variable names looked like total gibberish.  None made any 
amount of sense and resembled nothing like I had ever seen.  I can't remember 
any exact examples but they were reminiscent of something like
'int bjozh_in_rezhja'.  Comments were similar.  It all distracted me too much 
so I went through the code removing all the comments and changing variable 
names to 'int a', 'int b', etc as I encountered them.  I then found the 
problem and fixed it.

Afterwards, I asked what was up with the comments and found out that the 
previous developer was Russian and apparently spoke little to no English 
(subcontracted by a contractor).  He was writing all of his comments and 
variable names in what I assume is Russian!

Fun fun.
Kurt
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