plonq | (Reply)

From:

I think the bit of coding I take the most pride in was something I'd forgotten about until a co-worker stumbled across it years later. I don't remember now what the job was for - something related to customs, and the average time it took between sending manifests to US customs until they were cleared. It was actually something that this other guy had written, and I'd just added some complicated coding to handle date queries. It was written in an archaic programming language for the mainframe whose layout was still dictated by the ghost of punchcards.

The difficulty that he was having was that he needed to account for holidays and leap years in his calculations, and the complexity was beyond him since - among other things - he couldn't master the way this language called subroutines. I layered on a series of subroutines for four-year blocks, ending in 2032. At the end of that routine, I added a comment along the lines of:

"These routines subtract national holidays and account for leap years when calculating the processing time by US customs. I have built them out to work until the year 2032. I will be retired long before this becomes an issue, so I leave it as an exercise to whomever is reading this to expand this logic as needed. Also, if you are still using these mainframe reports in 2032, you have far bigger issues than trying to fix this report."