Cargo-Cult Programming

Here is an example I encountered of a chronic Cargo-Cult Programming affliction in a Junior engineer -- all code he wrote read:

if(CONSTANT == var) {
  // something
} else {
  // something else
}

The reason behind this is a fake "defensive programming" strategy as he protected himself against

if(var = CONSTANT) { ... }

which is does not do a comparison, it does an assignment which sometimes fails (when CONSTANT=0).

This is just bad coding. First, it's an eye-sore, second this programmer is not aware that new GCC iterations warn about this when using -Wall and even halt compilation when used in conjunction with -Werror

The fact that he was very stubborn did not help either.

-ulianov