How To Write Unmaintainable Code

Roedy Green shows us how to write unmaintainable code in order to show how to write maintainable code.  In the General Principles section:

"To foil the maintenance programmer, you have to understand how he thinks. He has your giant program. He has no time to read it all, much less understand it. He wants to rapidly find the place to make his change, make it and get out and have no unexpected side effects from the change.

He views your code through a toilet paper tube. He can only see a tiny piece of your program at a time. You want to make sure he can never get at the big picture from doing that. You want to make it as hard as possible for him to find the code he is looking for. But even more important, you want to make it as awkward as possible for him to safely ignore anything.

Programmers are lulled into complacency by conventions. By every once in a while, by subtly violating convention, you force him to read every line of your code with a magnifying glass.

You might get the idea that every language feature makes code unmaintainable -- not so, only if properly misused."

Parts of this make me laugh out loud (yes, it is that funny, especially when you see things you or your coworkers do).  My favorite section has to be the one on naming.  Read, laugh, then go change your programs!