Largest amount? 13k lines in a single Java file, none of which was boilerplate. Who knows how many lines were in the whole project... a million seems about right.
Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
171–180 of 601 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
When that is the case, would it not also be a really good place to explain why not, or provide a link to the place where such an explanation is provided?
In reality there often isn't time. Getting it done > Getting it done properly as far a management is concerned.
Ever had this discussion with a coworker?
Coworker: "I hadn't enough time to do it right"
You: "Given enough time, how would you do it differently?"
Coworker: "............" (crickets)
IMHO it's not related to deadlines only ; the "not enough time" argument is often a comfortable fallacy, keeping us from facing the limits of our current skills.
I found it to be especially true with testing. I've lost the count of how many times I heard "we didn't had time to write (more) tests". But testing is hard. And when given enough time, these developers don't magically start doing it "right" overnight.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#173I am maintaining one application in construction industry space. That application was created 25 years ago by construction worker that never wrote single line of code before, but because he caused a lot of problems on construction site they give him Programming 101 book and let him build it. 15 years later the app was close to half milion lines long of huge bowl of spaghetti code. Only comments in whole codebase were…
That's fascinating and gave me a genuine laugh.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#174A customer-facing dashboard. Yes, a dashboard. How bad can a dashboard be bad you ask? Well, for one, the dashboard had tabs, and each tab was a separate webapp hosted on a separate server. And each team was responsible for developing and maintaining the webapp that their team was incharge of (i.e the User team in charge of Users webapp, Feature1 team incharge of Feature1 webapp). Now add on the fact that different t…
Sounds eerily familiar to something we had at the investment bank I worked at. I'm guessing this is in finance and these apps are from different departments/desks?
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They go down often Isn’t that one of the two main features of the product?
"to go down" means "to be in a non-functional state" as in "Facebook went down". Compare to "to go up" like "servers are up" i.e. servers are functioning.
This is the biggest whoosh I have ever witnessed.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#176The worst program I ever worked on was something I was asked to maintain once. It consisted of two parts. The first was a web application writen in ASP. The second portion was essentially Microsoft Reporting Services implemented in 80,000 lines of VB.NET.
The first thing I did was chuck it into VS2010 and run some code metrics on it. The results were, 10 or so Methods had 2000+ lines of code. The maintainability index was 0 (number between 0 and 100 where 0 is unmaintainable). The worst function had a cyclomatic complexity of 2700 (the worst I have ever seen on a function before was 750 odd). It was full of nested in-line dynamic SQL all of which referred to tables with 100+ columns, which had helpful names like sdf_324. There were about 5000 stored procedures of which most were 90% similar to other ones with a similar naming scheme. There were no foreign key constraints in the database. Every query including updates, inserts and deletes used NOLOCK (so no data integrity). It all lived in a single 80,000 line file, which crashed VS every time you tried to do a simple edit.
I essentially told my boss I would quit over it as there was no way I could support it without other aspects of work suffering. Thankfully it was put in the too hard basket and nobody else had to endure my pain. I ended up peer reviewing the changes the guy made some time later and a single column update touched in the order of 500 lines of code.
There was one interesting thing I found with it however, there was so much repeated/nested if code in methods you could hold down page down and it would look like the page was moving the other way, similar to how a wheel on TV looks like its spinning the other way.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#177At a former employer someone created a framework to try and create a generic process to process and load data (i.e. ETL). It was written with the best of intentions, but was terrible. This framework was given to an offshore team, and they were told to use it to farm out hundreds of requests. The framework was inflexible enough that they each started adding snippets here and there to make it work for those projects, w…
Had something similar happen to me. I gave a new guy a task of 'figure out luigi or airflow to help us process nightly data better than crontab'.
He came back with a custom python/c++ framework where literally every function was called handle(), and in c++ it used type inference to figure out which handle() to call.
Apparently this is what he wrote for his last firm.
We quickly found something else for him to do but he didn't last much longer after that anyways.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe in the year 2050 some future intern/employee will be adding to the Office code and wonder about the "Don't touch this" code relics of the past that someone from long ago left for future generations.
I bet in 2050 people will puzzle over the microservice-cloud-javascript-Go-caching legacy systems that were developed in 2018 and be scared...
I mean, in 2018, I'm scared witless of all that. Anything cached in background to someone else's computer by something as unstable and slow as ECMAScript is just... a very bad idea. Keep programs local, and don't use Web coding / scripting for anything but the Web itself through a free-standing browser.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#179The worst program I ever worked on was something I was asked to maintain once. It consisted of two parts. The first was a web application writen in ASP. The second portion was essentially Microsoft Reporting Services implemented in 80,000 lines of VB.NET. The first thing I did was chuck it into VS2010 and run some code metrics on it. The results were, 10 or so Methods had 2000+ lines of code. The maintainability inde…
> spinning the other way
Hahhahah. That is the funniest shit I have read in a long time!
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#180Nobody mentioned Wordpress yet? Last time I checked it was a terrible pile of procedural code
Without a doubt. I've run into so many little "glitches" in WP that it really soured me to CMS backed websites. The next site I run is going to be 100% hand-coded.
... and it'll probably load a lot faster than the PHP+CSS nightmare that is WP.