From the Wiki Wiki:
A rating system for C-programmers. The more indirect your pointers are (i.e. the more "*" before your variables), the higher your reputation will be. No-star C-programmers are virtually non-existent, as virtually all non-trivial programs require use of pointers. Most are one-star programmers. In the old times (well, I'm young, so these look like old times to me at least), one would occasionally find a piece of code done by a three-star programmer and shiver with awe. |
Well, a Three Comma Programmer writes macros with three levels of nested commas (and plenty of gensyms — or a dangerous lack thereof) instead of using call-with style and separating syntax-level computations from base-level computations.
I once worked in a company (ITA) that at some point hired all the Lisp programmers it could. One who joined was a Three Comma Programmer. After the company lost its Big Customer to economic difficulties, it had to let its contractors go, and others had to maintain this Programmer's code. But his code was overly clever for what it was meant to do, with too many levels of infrastructure, and not enough documentation. That made it extremely hard to maintain. Not that it had a lot of bugs, but the few it had were a nightmare to unravel. And then, sometimes you had to add a feature or adapt the code to a modified specification... Thus, everyone rejoiced any time a colleague announced that he had deleted, replaced or rewritten one of the files authored by our Three Comma Programmer. Until it was all gone. Except for a free software library he had written that we were happily using, where he could keep his cleverness to himself. — Faré