What was trickiest code you've ever written?

Question

Hi,

As a programmer, I know sometime all has to write some code which they think -"Thank God! It's done" or "Ohh, how did I write it?"...

Do you have any such piece of code.

Answer 1

The trickiest thing for me was a ticketing system that allocated seating, choosing seats filling exact gaps and allocating the best seats first. This involved some tricky SQL to get contiguous(sequential) seat number ranges available.

Answer 2

C#:

Console.WriteLine("Hello world!");

Answer 3

I avoid writing tricky code. Not fun, neither to anyone nor to myself six months later.

Answer 4

a python script i wrote to learn python:

it takes a keyboard layout and a text and calculates the way every single finger has to go writing that text.

i think the tricky part here was learning python

Answer 5

I don't recall the specifics well, but a couple times I used something of this form:

do {
    switch(foo) {
    case 1:
        break; // syntactically breaks switch, but actually breaks loop
    case 2:
        continue; // as if this were supported by switch
    }
} while(false);

Answer 6

The trickiest code I ever wrote was a set of Prolog predicates to generalize a case defined in terms of of constant expressions by turning those constants into variables. One weekend, over 30 hours... good times.

I was the only person who figured out how to do it, so in all subsequent semesters, Dr. Upal just gave people the code. That takes all the fun out of it! LOL.

Answer 7

A parser for Mork in Java using regular expressions. It was a bad idea.

Answer 8

I've logged 100+ development hours on this one: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2550315/

Who'd thunk that adding a button to a report row would be so freaking frustrating >_<

Answer 9

It was a function to implement US Patent 5,873,116. The function in question wound up being about 10 or 15 lines of actual code. It took six months to work through all the different problems that could be caused by the different models of memory caching hardware that were involved.

Answer 10

A program that I wrote to check Tripit and place a graphic that says "Yes Honey, those jeans DO make your butt look fat" in my wife's Chumby stream only when I'm out of town. I did think "Thank God! It's done" but not until I was safely in the hotel. Somebody had to tell her.