100k lines of semi generated, semi handrolled java/c
Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
131–140 of 601 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#132Bad 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.
With that kind of stuff, clients usually also depend on defects and accidently behavior and they are not happy touching their own Client-Code integrating the service with their systems because it is of the same quality as the service.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#133After many years as a software engineer, I can only say that every large old application is a pile of messy junk. Whether it's database software at Microsoft, visualization software at (another company), a database at a third company, another database at a 4th company, another database at a 5th company, they are all filled with junk and crap.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
In reality there often isn't time. Getting it done > Getting it done properly as far a management is concerned.
This is a complete fallacy IMO. The time is 10 fold down the line when people are attempting to reverse engineer in order to maintain it.
Presumably, down the road, you'll either be a defunct company or doing well enough to afford 10 times the manpower to fix things.
Facebook was a spaghetti code mess in the beginning. I'm sure it caused them some growing pains, but moving too slowly early on would have likely been more costly.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#135Bad 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…
Sounds like a market opportunity. What vertical market is this, more specifically?
The only homeless former software developer I ever met had once been a cobol specialist.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#136My first job was sysadmin of a third tier ISP back in the dialup days. The account management and provisioning system that ran EVERYTHING was probably close to 100k lines of csh. Everything was done via a UI that the shell generated as a sort of curses-style interface. What was horrible about it was that it controlled everything from who got a website, active domains, what POPs users could dial into, metered billing,…
I had a similar job to this when I was a grad.
I got given an IDE that was written in korn shell to maintain. Not as mission critical as this sounds, but was the only way to edit, compile, link and deploy around 6000 COBOL programs that made up a very large and expensive financial services platform. It also integrated with the SCM (unix RCS!), did checkout, checkin, merging, branching and all manner of amazing things.
There was probably 30 devs who used it, all running on a HPUX server.
It was very powerful, but a total nightmare to look after.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#137Behold, academia. The only maintainers of this code, ever, have been grad students and postdocs. I estimate there have been about 12-15 generations worth. This code has supported hundreds of publications in its lifespan. A codebase that began life in 1987, in C. First ported to matlab in 1999. First source control was added (as SVN) in 2015. Between 2015 and 2018, there were 6 commits total, yet 3 people graduated ou…
Yeah. At this point I think teaching source control and abstraction should be part of the "the scientific method" part of the course
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#138My first job was sysadmin of a third tier ISP back in the dialup days. The account management and provisioning system that ran EVERYTHING was probably close to 100k lines of csh. Everything was done via a UI that the shell generated as a sort of curses-style interface. What was horrible about it was that it controlled everything from who got a website, active domains, what POPs users could dial into, metered billing,…
Wow this is legendary. I’d love to direct a short film or tv series that revolves around an IT/software team using a massive csh codebase like this. I’d love to generate some training montage / diagram sequence shots of the system being built by the characters maybe make some cool blender / adobe premiere overlay screen splits of the high level architecture as the team references certain aspects of the system
Make it like the IT crowd, but for a software team. That would be golden.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#139Behold, academia. The only maintainers of this code, ever, have been grad students and postdocs. I estimate there have been about 12-15 generations worth. This code has supported hundreds of publications in its lifespan. A codebase that began life in 1987, in C. First ported to matlab in 1999. First source control was added (as SVN) in 2015. Between 2015 and 2018, there were 6 commits total, yet 3 people graduated ou…
I think it is a problem in general with code for experiments. You just need to change a tiny bit for new experiment and you don’t want to ruin earlier experiment.
There's a very simple solution: guard your tiny bit of code with e.g. a command line flag that defaults to "off", and commit that.
It's a little more work sometimes, especially when your experiment changes things structurally, but it pays off over and over.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#140A customer-facing dashboard. Yes, a dashboard. How bad can a dashboard be bad you ask? Well, for one, the dashboard had tabs, and each tab was a separate webapp hosted on a separate server. And each team was responsible for developing and maintaining the webapp that their team was incharge of (i.e the User team in charge of Users webapp, Feature1 team incharge of Feature1 webapp).
Now add on the fact that different teams had varying levels of frontend competence. This led to some webapps being in (badly written) React, some in Angular, some in JQuery and one in Angular2 as well. Some were java API backed, some were NodeJS backed and one used Ruby in the backend. Oh yeah, and each had different datastores as well.
Now alongside this, there's no central auth framework, so each webapp had their own way of how to determine user auth (there was a shared cookie thankfully on the *.company.com domain), so there were 6-7 possible login and logout pages as well.
When the company had a brand redesign and needed all customer facing stuff to re-align with new design, we had to literally re-design 6 dashboards which have used different paradigms and different tech stacks.
To this date, the dashboard still exists and is used by customers (Main dashboard for a company valued at $500M+) and the most common issues are issues related to Auth (eg. random logouts when switching tabs), data inconsistency (They have crons which update data from one DB to another, but it's not immediate) and an inconsistent design and UI behaviour (since JS is also different for each app) which pisses off many users.
Till date, I'm not sure who signed off on this pointless dashboard design.