I worked in investment banking as a quant. Once had the misfortune of working with a regulator-approved custom built market risk system from the 90s. It had code in every language you can imagine, from cryptic Perl, to Java, to C. The thing worked, but development cycles were a year long, primarily to allow for regression testing. It was a monster to debug, as very few people have the brain space to simultaneously comprehend that many moving parts.
Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
191–200 of 601 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#192I am maintaining one application in construction industry space. That application was created 25 years ago by construction worker that never wrote single line of code before, but because he caused a lot of problems on construction site they give him Programming 101 book and let him build it. 15 years later the app was close to half milion lines long of huge bowl of spaghetti code. Only comments in whole codebase were…
What is he up to now?
I don't know. The company is based in rural Austria and so it took company quite some time to find another engineer that will took on this project (me). I have never met him or have any other contact with him.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#193I once had to look at a client’s code to determine if/how we’d go about taking over their application. Their only developer threatened to quit and this is when they realised it would be best to outsource this and reduce the bus factor. It was a huge folder (not repo - and there were zip files of different “versions” of the code in there). The main monster was a huge Visual Studio solution with hundreds of targets, on…
> In the same folder there was also source for an iOS app
A true monorepo
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> with software, it almost never works perfectly no matter how much time passes. There is a person inside me -- whenever this is said -- that wants to shout "No! You can prove correctness of your program!". But this complicates the issue even more, since afaik no elevator's correctness is proven but it just works. Mechanical stuff somehow just magically work without proof whereas it's still debatable if proven softwa…
> Mechanical stuff somehow just magically work without proof whereas it's still debatable if proven software works (did we prove the software that proved it?). It might seem like magic, but, of course, there is actually a science to it. Depending on the situation, a part can work if a certain length is 10.000 or if it's 10.001. In software, that is never the case: a value that should be 10 but is actualy 10.001 can s…
I mean, we have that kind of thing in software too, when it comes to e.g. memory usage or runtime (in a sense, anywhere we start hitting physical reality, really).
What should we make these buffer sizes? There's not really a right answer, but there are definitely some wrong ones. Make it big enough to handle the expected use cases and pad a bit extra. Works exactly like a tolerance in physical engineering.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#195A few weeks ago I had to reproduce one of the recent papers on deep learning theory. It had ~3000 lines of code over around 10 files, but when I just removed stale and unused calls and spaghetti (just like static analysis does), it reduced to ~1000 lines with identical functionality.
Original code also computed the most time-consuming routine twice to thrice each run and had many many typos, e. g. "calculte_infomration". Imagine this, but in every second function/variable.
However, it worked.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#196I am maintaining one application in construction industry space. That application was created 25 years ago by construction worker that never wrote single line of code before, but because he caused a lot of problems on construction site they give him Programming 101 book and let him build it. 15 years later the app was close to half milion lines long of huge bowl of spaghetti code. Only comments in whole codebase were…
Well, if you're working on a codebase for 10 years, then "no budget" is not really an excuse, sorry. As a responsible engineer, you should have either convinced management to spend some of your time on refactoring main parts, or cleaned it up yourself bit-by-bit every time you touch something. 10 man-years should be enough for a program that was created in 10 years by a single rookie dev.
Sure if this was my job, then I would do it but I am just contractor with set amount of hours devoted to the project. First few years was spend fighting fires as the company needed this very specific software to function, currently it is just about keeping eyes on having it run and occasional fix some report or update data pipelines.
I would say that rewrite would cost about 2 millions of euros. Which is really big price tag for company that use this system as a backoffice tool.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#197I am maintaining one application in construction industry space. That application was created 25 years ago by construction worker that never wrote single line of code before, but because he caused a lot of problems on construction site they give him Programming 101 book and let him build it. 15 years later the app was close to half milion lines long of huge bowl of spaghetti code. Only comments in whole codebase were…
Like reading the journal you found in the abandoned house you just moved in and it belonged to the previous kid that used to live there. Sounds like a movie.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#198Ten years ago I was called in to remediate a new web application which had been subcontracted to an Indian development company. The PHP developers who'd put it together evidently didn't know about classes, and each page in the application was hundreds, sometimes thousands, of lines of spaghetti code, most containing the same duplicated (but subtly changed) blocks providing database connectivity etc. Security had not…
I had a very very similar experience. I saw the craziest code in my entire career while debugging performance issues. Even though they were using a PHP MVC framework, they were pulling every record from a db table to iterate over to find the record using PHP string compare functions. I still can't believe it. The dev shop I worked for back then was even in the habit of hiring multiple teams for the same project in th…
> pulling every record from a db table to iterate over to find the record using PHP string compare functions
As horrible as this sounds, this is actually good from a refactoring point of view because it should be straightforward to rewrite it to use actual queries.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#199A 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 t…
To some extent this sounds like Spotify. I have been told it's basically Iframes stitched together, and each frame is owned by a team [0] , I do think Spotify has some better auth communication though.
0: https://www.quora.com/How-is-JavaScript-used-within-the-Spot...
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Isn't this what git branches are for?