Current co-worker, a contractor, on a remote project wrote 1000+ lines of JS to load a JSON file in Node (he didn't realize he could just require it).

While playing with Node as someone new to JS at the time, I wrote some code to load a JSON file due to not knowing I could require it... and it was vastly less than 1000+ lines.

On a similar basis, I once worked on a codebase where someone had implemented strftime, poorly, a few different ways, and also come up with several replacements for strptime, all of which had subtle bugs and none of which worked the same.

Both of your examples describe people who can code.

Given only the information you provided, I would hesitate to mock them, for fear they might make something really cool.

Though strftime is in ISO C, so there is little excuse, strptime is a POSIX function, so there is at least the possibility of a credible portability argument there. (Though this probably doesn't stretch far enough to justify the lack of an #ifdef to select the system's strptime if it is provided.)

In this particular case the application was already quite POSIX-dependent in other ways, but it's a good point to make -- I did hesitate before deciding on it for that reason, now that you remind me.

To add additional details, for those who might draw amusement and/or wisdom: In all cases the input/output date/time strings had the same format. Further, a number of the bugs were due to half-implemented reinventions of atoi being involved -- and atoi was definitely available, as one of the reinventions used it! Finally, in at least one case there was a Y2100 problem.

To be fair, I'd reroll atoi too - but only once, with "sufficient" unit tests (e.g. round trip unit tests for INT_MIN..INT_MAX), and only because atoi has no proper error checking nor wchar_t* variants.

Indeed; atoi in fact invokes undefined behavior in out of range situations; you can only safely use it when the input has been lexically analyzed to be a valid integer of only so many digits as not to overflow.

I'd tend to make this re-rolled atoi a wrapper around strtol/wcstol.

> atoi in fact invokes undefined behavior in out of range situations

Ouch! TIL. You'd think by now I wouldn't be surprised by such things, and yet, somehow I was...

On the other hand, if it worked, he could write a JSON parser, which most programmers cannot do.

I could forgive anyone for not knowing about requiring json files in node. It is kind of arcane.

But 1000 lines?

    var x = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync('filename.json'));

Huh neat I actually didn't know that.

There must be something missing to that story. Even the most asinine way I can imagine doing that would be 50 lines max.

Did he try to write a complete JSON parser from scratch?