Maintenance programming requires telepathy

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

I’m cleaning up old code and I come upon this:

/*
* Sanity…
*/
if( $this->timer < 1 )
$this->timer = 1;

I wonder why they did this? And why do they write “Sanity”?

Sometimes, when I do maintenance programming, on code written by another programmer, I feel like an archeologist, trying to imagine what bizarre rites these long ago people were engaged in when they wrote these cryptic remarks.

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