21–30 of 601 posts
1) How did it get that way, and what can we learn from that? 2) Is it inevitable that all software will end up like that? 3) How can an organization ever successfully sunset or move to a more maintainable system? Or should they even aspire to that?
* It was over 20 years old by the time I started
* It was written in Fortran
* Variable names were single and double digits
* Each fortran program would run in isolation but had a shared memory process
* It was formally a terminal program but a weird Java frontend was created so everything looked like Windows GUI
* All program names were four letter acronyms
* All data was stored in fixed width binary "flat" files
* It previously was under CVS version control, but each install slowly drifted apart, so each site had it own unique features and bugs.
* I once had to move a significant feature from one install to another using only patch files generated from the work done on the original install.
I'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!
> 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! This makes sense. However, if the code 1) is hard to understand (according to the developers available) and change and 2) needs to be changed, it costs money. Eg, read about the expense banks are now incurring trying to maintain COBOL systems. Whether the code is "bad" is…
Microsoft Biztalk. By "work", I mean it didn't crash. It also didn't do anything useful.
Mind you, it may have got better than my experiences with it, which as you can probably guess weren't very positive.
I’d like to hear people describe why the code they’ve seen is bad.
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…
It was a 3 months nightmare with an arrogant as fudge client/developer.