I think I've broken my own record with this one ~2500 lines of incoherent JavaScript/C#. Works though.
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?
#2Any large company. I’m being serious. As a development coach I see a lot of code and I must say the DEFAULT is “how does any of this even work?”
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#3Magento.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#4I’d like to hear people describe why the code they’ve seen is bad.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#5Windows
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#6My previous job. More than a million lines of code for a glorified CRUD app, with more than a $7 million annual budget.
Accruing technical debt was a process feature. More bad code that everyone is afraid to touch means more budget for terrified developers and testers, and insane networked database design means more budget for servers and sysops. The fear leads to meetings, the meetings lead to suffering, and suffering leads to the dark side. It still works according to spec, and is human-fixed quickly whenever it doesn't, but the poor quality of the codebase is likely costing at least $2 million per year.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#7Drupal 8
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#8Bad 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 also the source of about $500 million in revenue. They were doing software as a service in the 1970's. It's still going today. Customers in that space don't have many options.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#9I'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!
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#10Years ago as an intern at Microsoft, I had code go into the Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, and shared Office code.
Excel is an incomprehensible maze of #defines and macros, PowerPoint is a Golden Temple of overly-object-oriented insanity, and Word is just so old and brittle you'd expect it to turn to dust by committing. There are "don't touch this!"-like messages left near the main loop _since roughly 1990_.
I had a bug in some IME code causing a popup to draw behind a window occasionally, and a Windows guru had to come in to figure it out by remote-debugging the windows draw code with no symbols.
I learned there that people can make enormous and powerful castles from, well, shit.