Who's stupidity was it??

Well, My own humility might be blown away with this comment but i have to wonder about the stupidity of some programmers.

I have been working ona website now for a rather extended period. It started as a simple change of appearance of the site - which has since turned into a total rewrite of the whole site from start to finish including the database and all the code to run the site as well as the administration for the site. This small project which i quoted a rather small amount on has now turned into a MASSIVE project with basically the same amount of pay.

My gripe is simple. Programmers who don't think ahead when it comes to rewriting the site in the future. The whole site was completely undocumented and had absolutely NO consistent theme to any of the variables used or the way that the flow of the code was designed.

After many months i have basically written out all code bar a few small segments. I have not rewritten these segments quite simply because i have absolutely NO IDEA as to how they work. All that i know is that they do work and do return what i would expect.

I have to ask the question of some programmers (or should i say code mashers) - How do you expect to remember in say 6 or 12 months how a particular piece of code works when in most cases the code is so poorly written that it takes anything up to 15 minutes to follow the simplest of code paths.

One instance came to light today where i had to look over the original code to try and work out how to mash together some of the data from the original website database into the new site. We are at the point of going to a beta testing of this site and currently am trying to import the data ready for final testing. I had to follow a simple thing where some information was to be added to the original database. I was trying to understand how piece of information 'A' was then transformed into massive information pieces 'B C D E F'. After opening 11 different include files, 4 web browsers and 3 SSH sessions i was finally able to follow the code segment. Only to find that 'B C D E F' was always there and hardcoded into the database and only ever appeared once 'A' was passed to it. This total waste of time took in excess of 2 hours, 3 coffees and about 1000 obscene words.

Well i have had my say i guess. I do not under any circumstance try to say that i am an expert programmer. I am barely a novice compared to others that are around, but i do know that simple instructions and comments in the code could have easily saved me many hours of pain with this website.