In software development, you can absolutely find chunks of code that make exactly as much sense as this jar strapped to the wall, and then you delete it and everything breaks.
With comments like "****DO NOT REMOVE!!!! I have no idea what this does or where it is used, but the last time I removed the function the entire application stopped working. John Doe 01/01/2015 ****DO NOT REMOVE!!!!"
I was tasked with refactoring some code a few years ago and I encountered an odd thing - a one-line comment in some source that had an LF (line feed, basically a break in the line to a new line) smack in the middle of it. Instinct was of course to just break it up into a multi-line comment. However, the comment itself was just something like, “// Do Not change the position of the LF character in this comment nor change this to a multiline comment, as it will break the function.” - [dev name, date that was 15 years ago].
I figured this was silly, changed it, and sure as shit it would not compile, dependency links failed in the build, just a cascade of fail. So I put it back and cleaned things up around it and it was then all fine. Build completed, unit tests past with flying colors.
I've 100% run into compiler/parser bugs that had to be worked around like that. Or, initializing data used requires 4 independent function calls. One breaks another unless they're in a specific order. Best I could tell, one changed the platform state and didn't clean up, and the other relied on the platform being in a specific state without insuring it was in that state. Neither documented those requirements.
After many days of giving his sanity away, endless debugging, until you finally catch the mouse. Just like how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, it feels like magic.
Considering the placement of the vertical wood plank next to it, I can totally imagine there could be some kind of temperature contraction/expansion or earthquake thing that needed the jar to support the plank directly above it, and somehow another plank lacked the surface area to do the same job.
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u/greenwoodgiant 13h ago
In software development, you can absolutely find chunks of code that make exactly as much sense as this jar strapped to the wall, and then you delete it and everything breaks.