[austinpray]

I was to “go to person” for my university’s natural language processing research group. I built a database and accompanying REST API for bulk loading audio and transcription data for one of their projects. I was quite pleased with it.

When it came time for the researchers to submit transcripts I had the pleasure of reviewing probably the worst python program I have ever seen.

1) The request JSON was manually built using strings and string substitution. One immediate bug I saw was that the researcher forgot to wrap one of his keys in quotes. `{key: “val”}` is not valid JSON of course.

2) The python program did not actually make the web requests. It generated curl commands as strings and then printed them to std out.

3) The researcher then took all these generated curl commands and evaled them.

You seriously can’t make this stuff up.