[TUHS] Clueless programmers

Years ago, I had an new programmer who I just couldn't teach. He never understood the difference between an array and pointer, and apparently couldn't be bothered to learn. After string him along for three months, I was on my way into his office to fire him when I found out he had quit, but not before he checked a bunch of drek into our source code control system. I thought I backed all his commits out at the time. Years later I was running "purify" on our product looking for memory leaks. I found this small utility function that predated the source code control system leaking. This, I thought was odd, as it had been there FOREVER and was well tested. I brought up the source code system and checked it anyhow and found the afore mentioned programmer had checked in one change: he deleted the "free" call in it. I KNOW what happened. He did something else to corrupt the malloc heap in his code and often this causes a core dump in a subsequent malloc/free call. Apparently this was the place it struck him, so he just deleted the free call there.