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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.
Another representative line, and this one comes from an Excel spreadsheet. But, per Remy's Law of Requirements gathering ("No matter what the requirements doc says, what your users wanted was Excel"), this one was actually written by a developer. A developer who didn't understand how Excel works, but more important, didn't understand how dates worked either.
This comes from Ulysse J.
Frequent submitter Argle (previously), sends us a short little representative line. The good news is that this line of code came across Argle's screen during a code review: it was being removed. The bad news is that it was sitting in the code base for ages.
Apr 26_ = len / 8.0f;
Today's anonymous submitter works for a large company. It's one of those sorts of companies which has piles, and piles, and piles of paperwork and bureaucracy. It also means that much of their portfolio of software is basic CRUD applications. "Here's a database for managing invoices." "Here's a database for managing desk assignments." "Here's a pile of databases which link our legacy applications to our new ERP system."
Which brings us to our representative line. It is not a representative line of code, but a representative line of the design specification. This is the design specification for yet another database-driven application.