I once worked with a developer that had written some code to move a recordset pointer to the end of the set and then back to the begining again before working on it. When I asked him why he’d done something that seemed incredibly redundnant he told me “it’s just what we do to get it to work”. I found out that he’d copy/pasted these two lines of code all over the codebase and not once stopped to ask what it was really doing or why it should be doing it*.

My mentor at the time refered to it as “voodoo programming”, because it’s like waving a dead chicken in the air before you hit execute – you don’t know why it works but this one time it did so you just kept doing it.

kevin

* it turned out that the code in question was originally written to get around a bug with a (long since replaced) database driver and multi-directional recordsets. Since we were using a different driver (hell, an entirely different DBMS) and really just needed a forward-only recordset, this code really was a complete waste of resources – not just in one place but in many.