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Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#121

Post by pmarreck »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #64

My own CMS. Here's the function signature of the heart of it, which depending on circumstance may call itself recursively. function a_nodes_list_trees( $site_url, $base_url, $mode, $site_id, $max_subtree_depth, $nlevels, $node_id = 0, $tree_id = 0, $nleft = 0, $nright = 0, $nlevel = 0, $current_subtree_depth = 0, $flags = 0, $order = 'tree', $inline = false, /* needed when loading stuff via ajax*/ $skipped_types = []…

You're benefitting from an accurate mental model of this code (since you wrote it and work on it) and as soon as someone else has to work on this thing they are going to curse you.

So it might be job security but it's also vulnerable to the hit-by-a-bus problem

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#122

Post by booleandilemma »

gnulinux wrote: post #42

We have absolutely no idea how to write code. I always wonder if it's like this for other branches of engineering too? I wonder if engineers who designed my elevator or airplane had "ok it's very surprising that it's working, let's not touch this" moments. Or chemical engineers synthesize medicines in way nobody but a rockstar guru understands but everyone changes all the time. I wonder if my cellphone is made by mac…

We gotta finish these bridge foundations by this Friday, guys. The sprint ends next week and it’s a short week with Thanksgiving coming up.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#123

Post by sonnyblarney »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #64

My own CMS. Here's the function signature of the heart of it, which depending on circumstance may call itself recursively. function a_nodes_list_trees( $site_url, $base_url, $mode, $site_id, $max_subtree_depth, $nlevels, $node_id = 0, $tree_id = 0, $nleft = 0, $nright = 0, $nlevel = 0, $current_subtree_depth = 0, $flags = 0, $order = 'tree', $inline = false, /* needed when loading stuff via ajax*/ $skipped_types = []…

My god man that is beautiful. I'm going to put that on a poster.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#124

Post by buitreVirtual »

enjoiful wrote: post #75
gnulinux wrote: post #42

We have absolutely no idea how to write code. I always wonder if it's like this for other branches of engineering too? I wonder if engineers who designed my elevator or airplane had "ok it's very surprising that it's working, let's not touch this" moments. Or chemical engineers synthesize medicines in way nobody but a rockstar guru understands but everyone changes all the time. I wonder if my cellphone is made by mac…

The difference is, an elevator is a precisely defined problem and never needs to have its functionality improved and changed. In fact, you could build the exact elevator almost identically. Software is never like that — it’s dynamic and constantly changing throughout the life cycle of the software.

Indeed. Writing software is akin to drawing the design of the elevator, not building an individual copy of the elevator. Each elevator is equivalent to one instance of the software deployed to run in one place. The same design/code is used to build/create multiple instances. So when we write new software to solve a new problem, we are designing something new and unique - not another blueprint for the same elevator.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#125

Post by sooheon »

overcast wrote: post #9

I'm guessing by bad, you mean ugly. I'm fairly convinced there is no "good" code, or that it's such a minuscule subset that you'll never likely encounter it in your career. Every year I look back on last years stuff I've written, and I can find ten ways to clean things up. In my opinion, if it works, and provides the utility it was designed to bring, then it doesn't matter. If it makes money, then who really cares!

> If it makes money, then who really cares!

If it makes money now, you might care about continuing to make money in the future. Being able to reason about and change your product should help with that, but so will more money to throw at it, as this thread shows.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#126

Post by itsreallyme »

300,000 lines of Python…

The company had bought Ellington, a Django based CMS, but the team basically rewrote the entire thing using multi table inheritance (unintentionally), so everything in the database had two copies, and we had over 70 tables, hundreds of gigabytes, disasters every week and tons of bugs... I discovered this more than a year later and nobody was even aware. Even the DBA wasn’t aware the tables were duplicates.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#127

Post by jedimastert »

Not as big as some of the examples here, but still kind of interesting. I worked for a city government, and the entire backend code for our work-bids site was a few hundred files of PHP written with some sort of Dreamweaver framework that was deprecated years ago. Old enough that the entire site had to be run on PHP 5.7. I ended up rewriting the entire thing with Laravel (the framework of choice for the other webdev that was in the IT dept). It really didn't take that long; he just had too much on his plate to worry about it before I showed up.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#129

Post by jedimastert »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #92

The project around 10 million lines of code. Some of it was written in a very specific version of Fortran that was a PITA to compile. One fun experience was opening a file and seeing it was created on my birthday. Not in the sense just matching the day and month of my birtdhay. The code was literally written on the day I was born.

I recall rewriting a several thousand line program that was written in a preprocessing language that compiled to fortran that was homerolled by some random guy that was just so ahead of the game at the time that he basically wrote an extension of fortran with all the macros he made and rolled into one thing.

The rewrite was 100 lines long.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#130

Post by dc_gregory »

technix32 wrote: post #116
thepp1983 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality there often isn't time. Getting it done > Getting it done properly as far a management is concerned.

This is a complete fallacy IMO. The time is 10 fold down the line when people are attempting to reverse engineer in order to maintain it.

In this case, the evidence is that excel/word etc are doing fairly well...
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