Good news, everyone: it's time for a new series! Technically, this is not the first time that I've presented a Representative Line: a single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day. However, going back and renaming the old articles is a bit of a hassle, so I'll just pretend this is the first episode.

Today's Representative Line was uncovered by Hank Miller while he was "getting to know" a titanic system by fixing some of its bugs. This following function definition pretty much sums what the whole system is about ... 

bool return_true_24()

For clarification, the "_24" suffix is not some bizarre homage to the author's favorite television show. It's ordinal; there are actually twenty-three other return_true functions in the system, each one doing something slightly different and, ironically, often returning false.

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!