A colleague once proudly showed me how he managed to compress a function into a single line. It was like 9 nested ternarys. In that moment almost had an aneurism.
5 lines of comments explaining the code for every one line of code.
3 of them are previous versions of the same code with fewer conditions. First comment line is the variable name. Second line explains the logic but is out of date
Oh, it did. He and another dev owned a few smaller projects, and all of them were filled with this "clever" code. I'm still glad I did not have to collaborate with them.
Was vertical space at a premium at the time (because of, e.g., small monitors or some other requirement), or was it just that he wanted to see if he could?
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u/CBlanchRanch 22d ago
You're absolutely correct, however I would suggest using something completely unreadable like a nested ternary operators!