> But they all called him "a tool" (not in jest).

I never actually met the Atul who my nym "honors", but he was the worst programmer of all time (hence the '666'), and a few years ago I was tasked with fixing his code. Actually he was just one of a team of godawful terrible programmers, but he was the only one who left his name in the comments, saying -- I kid you not -- "Atul did this". He seems to have not realized how funny that sounds when read aloud in English.

Here's an example of how bad he was. He'd written a function to remove the leading whitespace from a string. His algorithm worked something like this: Check if the first character of the string is a space. If so, copy the entire rest of the string back one character, something like "while( str[x] ) str[x-1] = str[x];". And then repeat the whole process. Given a long string with lots of leading whitespace (which wasn't unusual), this process could take quite a while.

Another example: He'd written a function that returns a pointer to a string buffer. Most people would either a.) malloc a buffer of the right size, and return a pointer to it, or b.) declare a static buffer of a 'big enough' size, and return a pointer to it, at least so long as the app doesn't have to be thread-safe. Atul picked option c.), declare a regular array on the stack inside the called function, and return a pointer to local storage, with a comment in the code advising people to use the returned result immediately, before calling any other functions, otherwise the result would be overwritten. Wow. It even sort of worked, at least on Windows, anyway.