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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?

#571

Post by DonHopkins »

carlmr wrote: post #488
corobo wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except that's a really bad analogy. It's more like The response to every analogy ever made on the internet. Can we stop using them yet?

Spot on: "Analogies: Analogies are good tools for explaining a concept to someone for the first time. But because analogies are imperfect they are the worst way to persuade. All discussions that involve analogies devolve into arguments about the quality of the analogy, not the underlying situation." - Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert (I know he's quite controversial since the election, but he's on point here) in https…

Scott Adams has been quite controversial long before the elections, ever since he got busted as a sock puppet "plannedchaos," posing as his own biggest fan, praising himself as a certified genius, and calling people who disagreed with him idiots, etc. Not to mention his mid to late '90s blog posts about women.

But at least he wasn't using analogies, huh?

http://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpuppe...

>Dilbert creator Scott Adams came to our attention last month for the first time since the mid to late '90s when a blog post surfaced where he said, among other things, that women are "treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone."

>Now, he's managed to provoke yet another internet maelstorm of derision by popping up on message boards to harangue his critics and defend himself. That's not news in and of itself, but what really makes it special is how he's doing it: by leaving comments on Metafilter and Reddit under the pseudonym PlannedChaos where he speaks about himself in the third person and attacks his critics while pretending that he is not Scott Adams, but rather just a big, big fan of the cartoonist.

http://comicsalliance.com/scott-adam-sexist-mens-rights/

>Dilbert's creator Scott Adams Compares Women Asking for Equal Pay to Children Demanding Candy

Hmm, that sounds an awful lot like another analogy to me, actually... Oops!

So maybe Scott Adams isn't the most un-hypocritical guy to quote about the problems of analogies.

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

#572

Post by lousken »

oraguy wrote: post #18

Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code. What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap. Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousand…

now that's a candidate for a Rust rewrite

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

#573

Post by exikyut »

wcarss wrote: post #539
exikyut wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waited a bit for this question to pop up, but it didn't, to my surprise. So: > ...remote-debugging the windows draw code with no symbols Why, specifically, were no symbols available? I can't come up with an explanation. Surely old symbols are kept. Do checked builds take longer to iterate on (ie build), or something?

That's a great question! I didn't mean to imply that we absolutely couldn't have used symbols -- the answer is just because he was able to figure it out without them and it was less effort to try without first. Office and Windows are different teams and units, so one dev on one team typically wouldn't have access to all of the symbol info for the codebase of the other. Setting that up takes some hoop-jumping, so he t…

Wow, I see.

I must admit, I do very much wonder what kind of environment Microsoft would be if teams were less segregated. I found http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-w... in the comments, which seems to hint at the same sort of theme somewhat - particularly the bit about contributing to teams other than your own. There's a strong notion of isolation.

This is just thinking out loud, a response is not required. Everywhere has pros and cons. I'm (even with all this moping) actually less hesitant about MS as a whole than the rest of FAANG (except for N, which I also don't see a problem with) - not because of the whole "new MS" thing, or GH, but because everyone else seems to have fewer scruples than I consider to be a viable baseline. So there's that. :)

It's just kind of sad to see these kinds of inefficiencies, and it would be cool to eliminate them. Of course, it'd unleash organizational chaos for a while, but of course it would be totally worth it.

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

#575

Post by iopq »

lojack wrote: post #542
iopq wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, like in some programs when I figure out how to do it correctly the unit tests are either complete tautologies or integration tests. Then there are the "write once, never fail ever" tests. Okay, so the test made sense when I wrote the code. I will never touch that part ever again because it works perfectly. Why do I keep running them every time?

If the unit tests are tautologies then they aren't testing the right things, and if they are integration tests then they aren't actually unit tests. I personally run my unit tests every time to confirm my assumptions that the unit of code under test hasn't changed. I also assume all code I write will inevitably be changed in the future because business requirements change and there's always room for improvement. Actu…

The code that determines truths about the data never had to be rewritten.

Like, are the two points neighbors? I mean, I'm not going to write a version of this function for a spherical board in the future. Nobody plays on a spherical board.

It's also a really boring unit test. Yes, (1,1) and (1,2) are neighbors. Do I really need to test this function until the end of time?

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

#576

Post by blattimwind »

guscost wrote: post #550
Blaisorblade0 wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing Oracle's approach, this sort of problem is no different from any other software, even tho it reaches a larger scale. Branch from master, and rerun tests before the final merge, like you should in any other software? (Many processes fail that criterion, see https://bors.tech/ for something that gets this right). Ideally you work on a different enough bug that there's limited interaction, and ideally th…

But if the time needed to test and deploy a change is so ludicrous, it seems like you'd rarely get a big-enough window to rerun your tests before the upstream changes again. Either people are merging in unstable code, or the release lifecycle is a slow byzantine nightmare too (probably the case here).

Usually you don't test a single change before merging, but branch from master, merge any number of changes and then run the tests. So the master branch would move forward every 20-30 hours in this case, unless the tests of a merge batch fail, in which case master would kinda stall for a bit.

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

#578

Post by vmchale »

pmarreck wrote: post #95
le-mark wrote: post #8

Bad is not a good measure. But taking 'bad' to mean large, convoluted, zero documentation; I was once at a financial services company that had a 25 million+ LOC mainframe cobol application that had been under active development since 1969. This was a batch and CICs system. It was spaghetti on every level; database (db2, vsam, isam), the screens of the app, the batch jobs, the cobol. It was truly astounding. It was al…

Sounds like a market opportunity. What vertical market is this, more specifically?

It's only a market opportunity if the software is bad from a customer POV.

There's a lot of engineering that goes into/went into mainframes.

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

#579

Post by vmchale »

pmarreck wrote: post #548
vaylian wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I did not realize you meant to create a new software from scratch. I thought you were talking about supporting/extending/refactoring this old pile of madness. Thanks for the clarification! I suppose you were referring to the statement "Customers in that space don't have many options". Your statement is reasonable and there might be market opportunities to create new software. But I somehow have the feeling tha…

Thing is, a competing product does not (at launch) have to match the entrenched one feature-for-feature. It just has to tick the MOST IMPORTANT boxes while being advantageous in other ways (such as being built on FAR newer tech, more reliable etc.)

Being built on newer tech isn't an advantage from a customer POV. It's only an advantage when the newer tech is better, and tbh I have a hard time believing that you'd match the performance and security of a mainframe that easily.

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

#580

Post by breatheoften »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #471
alexeiz wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Well, your interviews went quite well. Now the final question: what would you do if you start losing your mind?"

"I'd like you to write a graph algorithm that traverses the abyss, the cosmic horror that consumes one's mind, that traverses twilight to the rim of morning, that sees the depths of man's fundamental inability to comprehend. Oh ya, the markers in here are pretty run down, let me pray to the old ones for some more"

I have written the algorithm you requested - but I wish I hadn’t run it. I hit ctrl-c when I realized what it was doing but it was too late... The damage is done — we are left with only the consequences and fallout.

Forgotten dreams like snowflakes melt on hot dusty ground, soon to turn into hard dry mud beneath a bitter polluted sky.

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