V155 casually mentioned on ##emacs.de that twittering-mode has over ten thousand lines of code. To further aid him in his evaluation of Twitter clients for Emacs, I did take a cursory look at its sources.
I don’t really mind that its very first compatibility check for an Emacs version of 21[1] loads up the bundled entirety of url.el, how it’s using inline certificates[2] and that like most antique japanese Emacs Lisp floating around it reinvents half of the network-related functionality recent Emacs releases come with including a pure Emacs Lisp implementation of SHA1 hashing, an obscure GPG helper[3] and hacks on existing JSON and XML parsers to support fallback to an uncommon UTF-8 variant. I won’t even speak about the way its actually Twitter-related functionality is implemented. No, I’d just like you to marvel at the very last form in its sources:
(progn (when (
boundp ( intern (
mapconcat 'identity '
("twittering" "oauth"
"consumer" "key" ) "-"
) ) ) (eval ` (
setq ,(intern (mapconcat
(quote identity) (quote
("twittering" "oauth"
"consumer" "key") )"-"
)) (base64-decode-string
(apply 'string (mapcar '1-
(quote (83 88 75 114 88 73 79 117
101 109 109 105 82 123 75 120 78 73
105 122 83 69 67 78 98 49 75 109 101
120 62 62))))))))( when ( boundp (
intern (mapconcat ' identity'("twittering"
"oauth" "consumer" "secret") "-")))(eval `
(setq ,(intern ( mapconcat 'identity '(
"twittering" "oauth" "consumer" "secret") "-"))
(base64-decode-string (apply 'string (mapcar '1-
(quote (91 70 113 87 83 123 75 112
87 123 75 117 87 50 109 50 102 85 83 91 101
49 87 116 100 73 101 106 82 107 67 113 90 49
75 68 99 52 79 120 80 89 91 51 79 85 71
110 101 110 91 49 100 49 58 71)))))) )))
First time I’ve ever seen Lisp obfuscation. I’ll leave taking it apart as exercise for the inclined reader.
edit: In case you’re wondering how the evaluation went, twaddle was considered easier to hack and understand.
| [1] | Mind you that Emacs 21 was released in 2000 which is over fifteen years ago and makes it about as hard to support as Windows XP. |
| [2] | There’s even a shell script included in the project root directory for updating these certificates with sed… |
| [3] | Why would you even name it alpaca-kill-buffer when it ends up calling alpaca-save-buffer? The alpaca-delete-file function is another WTF. |