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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?

#71

Post by poulsbohemian »

nathan_long wrote: post #68
poulsbohemian wrote: post #21

As many experienced commenters below have already noted, nearly any piece of substantial, revenue-generating, long-lived code will ascend to a place full of dragons and mysticism. The more interesting debates revolve around: 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 mai…

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-banks-cobol/banks-scr... describe banks struggling to maintain ancient COBOL systems as the developers who understand them are dying off. I don't know exactly what they should have done and when, but it seems like rewrites are going to be necessary, and it sure would be nice to start rewriting a system while you still have someone who can explain what it does.

In the post-Y2K years, I heard a lot about how the next order of business was going to be to replace all those systems in health care, banking, etc, especially as a generation went into retirement. But, here it is 2018 and there are still articles Food for thought.

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

#72

Post by 52-6F-62 »

gnulinux wrote: post #42

We have absolutely no idea how to write code. I always wonder if it's like this for other branches of engineering too? I wonder if engineers who designed my elevator or airplane had "ok it's very surprising that it's working, let's not touch this" moments. Or chemical engineers synthesize medicines in way nobody but a rockstar guru understands but everyone changes all the time. I wonder if my cellphone is made by mac…

>I wonder if engineers who designed my elevator or airplane had "ok it's very surprising that it's working, let's not touch this" moments.

I honestly sometimes do wonder. Judging by the elevators in my building some things even barely work at times. They go down often and require parts replacements that take weeks to arrive. They're barely 3 years old.

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

#74

Post by PavlovsCat »

abledon wrote: post #70
PavlovsCat wrote: post #64

My own CMS. Here's the function signature of the heart of it, which depending on circumstance may call itself recursively. function a_nodes_list_trees( $site_url, $base_url, $mode, $site_id, $max_subtree_depth, $nlevels, $node_id = 0, $tree_id = 0, $nleft = 0, $nright = 0, $nlevel = 0, $current_subtree_depth = 0, $flags = 0, $order = 'tree', $inline = false, /* needed when loading stuff via ajax*/ $skipped_types = []…

I feel your accounts bio perfectly matches the spirit of your posts content here haha!

The quotes in my bio are by people who thought things through, while the CMS exploded in scope while I made it, so I'm not quite sure what you mean. Can you elaborate?

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

#75

Post by enjoiful »

gnulinux wrote: post #42

We have absolutely no idea how to write code. I always wonder if it's like this for other branches of engineering too? I wonder if engineers who designed my elevator or airplane had "ok it's very surprising that it's working, let's not touch this" moments. Or chemical engineers synthesize medicines in way nobody but a rockstar guru understands but everyone changes all the time. I wonder if my cellphone is made by mac…

The difference is, an elevator is a precisely defined problem and never needs to have its functionality improved and changed.

In fact, you could build the exact elevator almost identically. Software is never like that — it’s dynamic and constantly changing throughout the life cycle of the software.

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

#76

Post by gabriel34 »

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…

Really surprising considering that Oracle is the standard for serious enterprise databases. Not really surprising when you consider Oracle's other bug ridden offerings (probably not as thoroughly tested). Makes me fear for Oracle 18c.

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

#77

Post by lowry »

chad_strategic wrote: post #69
chad_strategic wrote: post #7

Drupal 8

I never worked in Drupal 7, but I can't image it was much better.

Drupal 6 was actually a pretty consistent hooks-based system that exploited the fact that PHP has a fast and feature-rich implementation of the function lookup table.

Drupal 7 started the migration to object-oriented code and was halfway through the messy rewrite when it was released. Drupal 8 finished where Drupal 7 left. That's where the majority of the developers left as well (pun intended).

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

#78

Post by mkolassa »

billwear wrote: post #25

Actually, if you want to see clean code that works well, try the traditional ex/vi source. It's something like 20K lines, but very neat functional programming all the way down.

I just want you to know that through rabbit holing 'traditional ex/vi source', the following happened...

1) Read a Wikipedia page for vi.

2) Noticed that Bill Joy used a Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal.

3) Discovered that Lear Siegler was the result of a merger between Siegler Corporation and Lear, Inc.

4) I know that Lear, Inc. was founded by William 'Bill' Lear.

So, not only do we have Bill Lear to thank in a way for vi, but your username is oddly familiar...

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

#79

Post by cntlzw »

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…

How are the changes to rewrite this castle of shit? Being a developer I would hate working on that pile of garbage but judging from management? Well if it works it works. Being pragmatic ain’t that bad.

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

#80

Post by cntlzw »

gabriel34 wrote: post #76
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…

Really surprising considering that Oracle is the standard for serious enterprise databases. Not really surprising when you consider Oracle's other bug ridden offerings (probably not as thoroughly tested). Makes me fear for Oracle 18c.

Not surprising at all. There code might be not performance, maintainable or good looking by developer standards but as OP said they have a gazillion of test cases that make sure oracle db runs and doesn’t produce weird outcomes.
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