Code horror Memes

Ah, the Egyptian bracket style. The sacred hieroglyphics of coding that make senior developers contemplate career changes. The tweet starts reasonably: "Use whatever brace style you prefer." Sure, K&R, Allman, whatever floats your boat. But then it shows that monstrosity - opening braces on the same line as code but closing braces aligned with the opening statement. Whoever created this abomination clearly enjoys watching the world burn. It's like they're actively trying to get banned from code reviews. The recursive permutation function is just the cherry on top of this crime against humanity. Ten years of maintaining this code and you'd be googling "how to change careers to goat farming."

DARLING, SWEETIE, HONEY CHILD! 💅 You haven't lived until you've inherited code where some ABSOLUTE PSYCHOPATH decided that variable declarations should be wrapped in try-catch blocks! Like, what kind of trauma led to this?! Are they expecting the variable to PHYSICALLY ASSAULT them during initialization?! "Oh no, my string might throw an exception when I declare it!" PLEASE! This is the coding equivalent of wearing a helmet to eat soup! I CAN'T EVEN! 🙄

The box of horrors that contains your legacy code from 2 years ago. You'd rather lose a limb than have to maintain that spaghetti nightmare you wrote when you were "just getting it to work." Nothing induces more existential dread than having to revisit your own documentation-free code with variable names like 'temp1', 'temp2', and the classic 'finalVersionForReal'. The code still runs somehow, but touch it and the entire system implodes. Your past self is your current self's worst enemy.

Behold the majestic triangle of nested conditionals—where each layer takes you one get_step() deeper into madness! This magnificent code sculpture starts with a simple function call and then descends through increasingly absurd levels of nesting, creating that beautiful triangular indentation pattern. It's like the developer thought: "Why write a loop when you can create a fractal of if statements?" The real genius is how each return statement has precisely the right number of get_step() calls to match its indentation level. Pure algorithmic poetry—or a cry for help from someone who discovered code folding and decided to test its limits. The "Wedge of Destiny" indeed—because your destiny is to maintain this masterpiece during the 3 AM production outage when you've run out of coffee.

When your junior dev asks "What's the modulo operator?" and you're too deep into your fifth coffee to explain basic math. Nothing says "I'm a professional" like hardcoding 50 if-statements to check if a number is even when return number % 2 == 0; would do the trick. But hey, at least it's thoroughly tested for numbers 1-22! The face in the corner is all of us reviewing this code during a PR. Silent horror.

When you need to reverse a number's sign but decide to take the scenic route through Absurdistan... This function is the programming equivalent of using a nuclear submarine to cross a puddle. The code checks if d is negative, then uses Abs() to make it positive (reasonable). But if it's positive? It subtracts d*2 from itself—a galaxy-brain approach to multiplication by -1. What makes this truly horrifying is that this overcomplicated monstrosity was part of the UK Post Office's Horizon system that led to the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of postal workers. Real people went to jail because someone couldn't write d = -d . The tragic irony? The comment literally shows the correct solution right above the function. It's like putting "just use stairs" in the elevator manual, then designing a catapult instead.

BEHOLD! The magnificent horror that is someone's attempt to solve a problem with regex! What we're witnessing here is the digital equivalent of trying to perform brain surgery with a chainsaw while blindfolded. That monstrosity of characters isn't code—it's a cry for help! When your regex looks like someone fell asleep on the keyboard, you've officially entered the ninth circle of programming hell. The developer who wrote this probably started with a simple pattern and then spiraled into madness as they kept adding more and more exceptions until their sanity completely evaporated. Their computer is probably still trying to process this abomination to this day!