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From: Pierre Gaston <pierre.gaston@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: gnu.bash.bug
Subject: Re: alias problem -- conflict found
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2019 14:09:53 +0200
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Cc: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au>, bug-bash@gnu.org
To: L A Walsh <bash@tlinx.org>
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On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 2:03 PM L A Walsh <bash@tlinx.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 2019/07/10 00:04, Robert Elz wrote:
> >     Date:        Tue, 09 Jul 2019 20:24:30 -0700
> >     From:        L A Walsh <bash@tlinx.org>
> >     Message-ID:  <5D255A6E.4060600@tlinx.org>
> >
> >   |     Why?  What makes clarity "horrible".
> >
> > It isn't the clarity (if you call it that, it is really obscurity
> > as no-one else can read your scripts/commands and have any idea
> > what they really do) but the using of aliases that way to achieve it.
> >
> I doubt that.
>

Steven Bourne did the same tricks in C, and it lead to the creation of the
The International Obfuscated C Code Contest

https://www.ioccc.org/faq.html

Q: How did the IOCCC get started?
A: One day (23 March 1984 to be exact), back Larry Bassel and I (Landon
Curt Noll) were working for National Semiconductor's Genix porting group,
we were both in our offices trying to fix some very broken code. Larry had
been trying to fix a bug in the classic Bourne shell (C code #defined to
death to sort of look like Algol) and I had been working on the finger
program from early BSD (a bug ridden finger implementation to be sure). We
happened to both wander (at the same time) out to the hallway in Building
7C to clear our heads.

We began to compare notes: ''You won't believe the code I am trying to
fix''. And: ''Well you cannot imagine the brain damage level of the code
I'm trying to fix''. As well as: ''It more than bad code, the author really
had to try to make it this bad!''.

....