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

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241–250 of 363 posts

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

#241
In 2009-ish I wrote a Java-based templating system for Autosys' Job Information Language. If you don't know it, Autosys is a horrible, horrible, job management and scheduling system. You define these little files (.jil extension) that specify not only the job definition (command, user, cron-like schedule, etc.), but also its dependencies (which job must run before this one, what runs after...). Nothing wrong with that approach, per se, but there's essentially no way to validate the correctness of a job and its dependencies until it's running live in production. Often jobs would fail to run when you expected, or become quietly orphaned by some change to another upstream job.

So I wrote a disgusting (yet fluent!) enum-based monster called JILT (Job Information Language Template), that required that every existing .jil file be rewritten as a statically-typed java enum which could then be used to spit out the entire tree of validated .jil files. The nice thing was that your job dependencies were now enforced by the compiler and could be included in CI. But the actual inner workings were a hot mess. And of course, now the support teams have two systems to maintain and ensure they remain in sync.

This was at Goldman Sachs and I hear it's still under active development by the support teams...

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

#242

A few things that I wrote as far back as 2000 and 2001 are still in use. Just checked one right now and the login screen is still the same - no doubt passwords have changed, and it says it's running on php 5.5.9 on ubuntu - they've done some upgrades, and I can't imagine the backend is 100% the same. however, the url structure was built to do something funky, and that is still in place, meaning they very likely didn'…

I cant imagine dealing with code dependencies 15 years from now.

In one case, the entire thing was far more self-contained than anything that would be written today. This was PHP, and there wasn't much of a standardized ecosystem - not sure that PEAR was even a thing in 2000 when this was started.

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

#243
post #223

I am still using a Makefile from the early 90s, just altered for new projects, infact it is probably a direct descendant of the original Makefile.

oldest I could find, dated 1979: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/...

current gnu make: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/make.git/plain/Makefile.am

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

#244
This reminds me of the Monty Python competitive nostalgia sketch "Four Yorkshiremen", except re-done for coding:

"Compiler, we used to dream of having a compiler" "I did me coding on punched cards w'a big rubber band around 'em" "Punched cards, you don't know y'er born, all we 'ad when I were a lad were an abacus". "And it were a 5-channel Baudot abacus an all."

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

#245
I wrote a bash script for generating manuals for GNU software in different formats a decade and a half back. The script made it's way into GNU texinfo, and has undergone several revisions since. It is still used in order to generate manuals for different software on https://www.gnu.org/software/

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

#247

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…

I just recently started using Audacity. So thanks!

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

#248
I wrote the code for http://lab.mrl.ucsb.edu/ circa 2011-2012 during for a work-study job. It's used for scheduling facility equipment. The original site was written in PHP4, and I scrapped it using PHP5, MySQL and jQuery. I had 0 experience at the time, AFAIK the code lives on unchanged.

Earlier than that, I wrote an Access database to manage claims for a small insurance company circa 2009. Except I wrote it in Access 98 and the last time I saw it the file was corrupted. I offered to help fix it but I was kicked out of the building for flirting with the claims department manager (actually a close friend of mine). This one may actually no longer be in use because I never split the UI and DB and it's not supposed to handle multiple users at the same time if you don't, IIRC.

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

#249
post #110

My "personal" website that I made when I was a kid at 2001. I think that I uploaded it to the Geocities free hosting and soon forgot about it. Then a few years back when I googled my name I stumbled upon it haha It is still up after more than 15 years on god know which free hosting and server, it was so funny. And of course it is used as a joke now by my friends :) And of course I have forgot my credentials long long…

My design skills were lacking when I was a kid http://web.archive.org/web/20040511180502/http://www.geociti...

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

#250
I haven't stayed at a job for longer than 3 years, and all of them have been internal projects with no external visibility, so I can't really know for sure. I do have a 21-line python script that I still use which I initially committed to github in 2008, so that's certainly a contender (first internship started in fall 2004).

The script is an expansion on the web server one-liner: https://github.com/imnotpete/odds-and-ends/blob/master/pytho...

edit: the one liner: http://www.garyrobinson.net/2004/03/one_line_python.html

And of course, reading that, I see my script is hugely overkill since all it does is alter the default port and allow you to pass one in -- something the one-liner can apparently do. Oh well.

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