story time

one time i did a programming assignment where you were supposed to write some code and then later, explain to a TA why you wrote the code the way you did and how it works. i had written my code like a week earlier and it was the day where we had to justify it

so i waited in line for my turn with the TA and they asked my name and pulled up the code

"so, how does this function here work?"

"ah, hm. well, it works like [etc etc etc]. but that's a pretty ugly way to do it. i don't know why i wrote it that way. i SHOULD have done [something else]"

"i see. why did you do this weird thing?"

"jesus, i have no idea. i'd normally write it [this other way]... the reason this works is [etc etc etc] but it's not exactly pretty to use that for this. don't remember why i chose to do that this time."

"hm. okay. how come you have mixed space and tab indentation?"

"...uh. i use tabs in my own code but i know that this class's style guide mandates spaces, so i always just run it through a sed script to convert the tabs to spaces. something must have gone wrOH MY GOD THIS IS A DIFFERENT [deadname]'S CODE"

@monorail yup you definitely wrote that code. that's a huge mood.