The Worst Python Code Ever

A while ago some friends and I brainstormed some dumb functionality we would include in an over-engineered esoteric programming language. I’ve had a go at implementing some of them as a Python module (esoterrible) and I can confidently say it’s the worst code I’ve ever written. When you import it, it messes with your builtins to achieve the following “features”

UTC? What’s UTC?

Don’t even need to set timezones on your datetimes! Esoterrible will analyse whether your source code contains more British or American English (anglocentric, I know) and use that to enforce timezones on datetime objects. Also it complains if you try to use both British and American English.

Truthiness is in the eye of the caller

Tired of only having True and False boolean built-ins? Are you a butterfingers who ends up writing Talse by accident? A whole new spectrum of booleans are available, which are true or false a random percentage of the time based on how closely they resemble True or False

Traditional Dictionary “Lookups”

It’s all well and good being able to access dictionary values in O(1) time, but don’t you wish those pesky Python dictionaries acted a bit more like the real thing? Instead of reporting KeyErrors on missing keys, dict will return a lovely dictionary definition instead.

Looks optimised to me

Wouldn’t it be great if optimising your code for performance were as simple as making it look like its been optimised for performance? time.sleep now checks the amount of whitespace and number of lines in the code it was called from, so bunched up illegible functions now sleep for less time than beautiful, cleanly-formatted code. In theory you could add this lag effect to every built-in.

*beep* warning, variable reversing

Access a reversed list or string just by using the reversed name of the variable! One less builtin to worry about! Note: not at all practical to implement so it just does it in a really useless way.

Why? How?

Just in case looking at the source code melts your face off à la Raiders of the Lost Ark, here’s the highlights of how I achieved the above effects:

• Take all the possible 4-5 letter words using the set of letters (T, R, U, E, F, A, L, S), take the ones which have a low summed word-distance to True and False (so they are similar and en-route when transforming one to the other). The distance from False indicates how “truthy” they should be. Looks like overwriting dict literal syntax is not trivial so it only works with dict() constructor.

• Inspect the __main__ module’s file location to identify American/British spellings, using a saved list of differences taken from this site

• Use the inspect module to find the name and source code of the function/module which calls the function I override time.sleep with.

• Reversing names proved difficult for a couple of reasons:
  • Not easily able to fire on variable creation to create the counterpart variable with reversed name. The helper function rotate_the_board() is what creates the counterparts when called
  • Updating an arbitrary local scope with new variables is challenging/impossible so all updates are just applied to builtins. I’m guessing some introspection of frames miiight make it possible to access the caller’s globals
• Very liberal use of setattr(builtins, <name>, <value>)

Feel free to throw any garbage PRs onto this fire.