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Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

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Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#201

Post by slazaro »

Det_Jacobian wrote: post #181

I have the luck of having written GPU code on the base pixel shader on a title (Halo 4) that sold on the order of 10 million copies, first game I ever worked on. A back of the envelope calculation for how many times this code has been executed since 2012: 1e7 copies * 10 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds * 30fps * 1280 * 720 ~~ 300 quadrillion

According to Wolfram Alpha [1], it's 9953280000000000000, which is 10 quintillion! :O

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1e7+*+10+*+60+*+60+*+3...

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#202

Post by jonathankoren »

kijin wrote: post #168

Wrote a music library organizer and MP3 player in 2003 because none of the existing options worked the way I wanted. The initial implementation was in VB6, later ported to VB.NET. I don't use it anymore, but at least one of my family members still does. It's really fast on modern hardware and Windows 10. Unimaginatively named "Music Player", it remains the only music library organizer that I've used so far that compl…

I wrote a similar script except in Perl for pretty much the same reason. I learned to hate CDDB files. Such a horrible mess.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#203

Post by armamut »

I wrote a Microsoft Excel macro (yes, it's VBA) when I started my current Job at 2008. It only converts badly formatted txt output of mainframe to an Excel file. Just does it only, but does it well.

I'm very amused that even today people use my macro and thank me for writing it.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#204

Post by user_rob »

I designed some of the electronics and wrote some firmware code for the Bell AH-1S Cobra in 1978 1979. The system is still flying as I see the external parts of the system in news clips. Does that count? Beat that!

Mean looking image of a parked up one - the red bag covers part of the system: http://www.vaq136.com/misawa/cobra73418-017b.jpg

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#205

Post by erikb »

In a mostly proprietary environment that's really hard to say. In the world I live in (Germany software business world) few things get really deleted once they made it into the daily life of a company. Nearly all companies have code that was written like 5 years before their foundation by one of the glorious first 3 guys and that is still used in most of their major software products. The tricky part is getting even awesome software into these daily routines.

Hell, I'm quite sure that some of the first software I wrote is still used in SAP despite me never having worked for them.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#206

Post by davemac »

haberman wrote: post #36

MP3 importing code for the Audacity audio editor. I wrote this in 2002. https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/master/src/import/... Amusingly, a TODO I put is still there: /* TODO: get rid of this by adding fixed-point support to SampleFormat. * For now, we allocate temporary float buffers to convert the fixed * point samples into something we can feed to the WaveTrack. Allocating * big blocks of data like this i…

Was going to prison related to this software?

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#207

Post by avail »

tyho wrote: post #200

Many of these examples are older than me, but I wrote a userscript which writes a bash script which rips lossless audio from a music streaming service which is no longer with us when I was 14. It tags the files appropriately, and makes a release suitable for upload to a well known private music tracker. I released it to a private group of people, it has been kept a secret within that group mostly and has since been e…

Would be interesting to read through the userscript - any intention on open sourcing/sharing?

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#208

Post by aexaey »

near wrote: post #106

There's an entire community of video game hackers (smwcentral.net) using a cross-assembler I wrote in 2001 named xkas. I added a few minor patches and by early 2004 I had released the final version, v06. I never really intended for anyone to use it seriously. I made it for myself, but went ahead and posted it online anyway. It is a 1500-line single-file, nearly-commentless, nearly-spaceless abomination of code with n…

Thank you for this:

> ...and by early 2004 I had released the final version, v06.

I wish more software had "final version", where possible [0] as opposed to endless churn and inevitable "is this project dead" question after a couple of weeks/months of inactivity. [1]

[0] Obviously some projects can't do this. E.g. there is no way youtube-dl would ever have a final version, etc..

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=is+this+project+dead+site:gi...

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#209

Post by spb »

davemac wrote: post #206
haberman wrote: post #36

MP3 importing code for the Audacity audio editor. I wrote this in 2002. https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/master/src/import/... Amusingly, a TODO I put is still there: /* TODO: get rid of this by adding fixed-point support to SampleFormat. * For now, we allocate temporary float buffers to convert the fixed * point samples into something we can feed to the WaveTrack. Allocating * big blocks of data like this i…

Was going to prison related to this software?

I think you're confusing this comment with the one ranked above it.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#210

Post by wscott »

In 1990, during a summer internship at GE, I wrote a program that scheduled electric motor production at like 7 factories around the country. You would download the next weeks worth of orders from their timeshare system, which seemed ancient then. Someone had done a time-motion study of each motor model and determined how much time each motor needed in different stations. They wanted each day's schedule to use roughly the same amount of time in each station.

This was after my first year of college and I really knew nothing about algorithms. I wrote a horrific program in BASIC on a PC that did what I know now is a greedy bin packing solution. It created a least squares metric and tried moving and swapping orders until nothing improved the metric.

I was shocked to hear that 20 years later they were still using that same program.

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