Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/303/
Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
281–290 of 601 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#282I 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…
>> there is not enough budget to actually rewrote whole system, As pointed out elsewhere, this is definitely solving a real problem, the longevity of the app is the proof. Instead of rewriting, can you replace it with newer idioms? A MVP/PoC for a newer way of solving a problem (AR may be here) that the software solves with some tangible gains, the latter is more important, can lead to approval of a mini budget for t…
Well, maybe. Biggest problem is using database from 80s, which is used in a way that sometimes it acts like database, sometimes it is used by copying files (one file per table) around random directories with custom locking mechanism.
App consist of maybe 20 different codebases that generate around 30 executables, kind of randomly, fetching source files from different codebases as programmer find a fit + random "fixes" of system modules/component make it all very very hard to do much groundbreaking work.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#283Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/303/
The number is cool.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#284Oracle 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…
That is absolutely insane. I can't even begin to imagine the complexity of that codebase. I thought my Rails test suite was slow because it takes 4 minutes. If I wrote it in C or C++ it would probably be 10 seconds. I can't imagine a C/C++ application where the test suite takes 20-30 hours on a test farm with 100-200 servers. And if you can break 100-1000 tests with a single change, it doesn't like things are very mo…
It's a good exercise to imagine how the job would be sold. Things like this would definitely not come up in the interview process, instead they would sell you on "you get to work on a cutting-edge db kernel that is running most of the Fortune 100s" or sth like that, which is true (!), but doesn't describe the day to day.
The best way to guess this is to extrapolate from the interview questions. If they ask you a lot of low-level debugging/macro/etc questions..
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#285[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#286Oracle 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…
You described the early part of my career in software to a T.
I worked for a mini-computer company in the 1980's that ported Oracle (I'm thinking the version stamp was 22.1 when I was there from 1986-1990). It was one GIANT mess of standard "C" with makefiles that were in some ways larger and more complex than some of the actual kernel code it was building!
Took 24 hours to build the product... lol
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> an elevator is a precisely defined problem Ha! As a mechanical engineer, no, nothing in reality is ever precisely defined. Consider that every single part in the elevator has a tolerance: none of the parts are exactly the same in every elevator. Did you account for thermal expansion? What about wear? Fatigue? > Software is never like that — it’s dynamic and constantly changing throughout the life cycle of the softw…
> 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 things allow a surprising amount of modularity, compared to software, and therefore make it easy to get test coverage.
E.g. your cable is rated for 10,000 kg and 6-month inspections, your driveshaft can go 5 million revolutions or 9 months before it needs to be greased...test all those things separately, put them together and you have a stateless system that if it works today will work tomorrow.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#288We 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 always wonder if it's like this for other branches of engineering too?
EE here. It's not. The entry bar is much higher: most of the time difficult projects are given to senior engineers. It takes a degree and many years of work to get there.
> Or chemical engineers synthesize medicines in way nobody but a rockstar guru understands
Been there. Not at all.
> cellphone is made by machines designed in early 1990s because nobody was able to figure out what that one cog is doing
Same. Part of the reason is that any physical component adds cost, weight, and so on to a project.
In software you can throw code and random libraries at a problem and nobody will notice until vulnerabilities start to pop later on.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that's a really bad analogy. It's more like you set up guard rails, and every time your vehicle hits a guard rail you change the algorithm it uses for navigation until it can do a whole run without hitting a guard rail. I've experienced myself how the code quality of proper TDD code can be amazing. However it needs someone to still actually care about what they're doing. So it doesn't help with idiots.
I don't think it's a generous analogy, but it's poking fun at being test DRIVEN, rather than driver driven. I think he'd agree with you that it's the thinking and navigating and "actually caring about what they're doing" that matters. Tests are a tool to aid that. Tests don't sit in the driver's seat.
Yeah. To me "test driven" really means that I write code under the constraints that it has to make writing my tests sensible and easy. This turns out to improve design in a large number of cases. There are lots of other constraints you can use that tend to improve design as well (method size, parameter list size, number of object attributes, etc are other well known ones). But "test driven" is a nice catch phrase.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#290I was given the opportunity to work with iOS at one of my former employers and I quickly agreed (I was a backend developer back then). It was a rather popular application at a rather large Austrian media company, with around 50k unique monthly users. Boy did I regret that decision! - 100KLOC - Initial development outsourced to India. Comments, variable names in Indian. - Subsequent development outsourced to Belarus.…
You were "given the opportunity" huh? :)
How long did you work on that before you threw in the towel?