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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?

#361

Post by hprotagonist »

thepp1983 wrote: post #320
carlmr wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I found it to be especially true with testing. I've lost the count of how many times I heard "we didn't had time to write (more) tests". But testing is hard. And when given enough time, these developers don't magically start doing it "right" overnight. Bingo. It's not necessarily only skills though. It can be myriad reasons and "no time" is just the easiest excuse they can think of. In big companies I've often seen…

To even write unit tests effectively you need to write your code in a certain differently. In C# this normally means using IOC + DI. Also almost nobody I know does proper TDD. I know it is very convincing when one of the TDD evangelists shows you how to write something like a method to work out the nth number in a fibonacci sequence using nothing but just writing tests. In reality most 95% of developers that even wri…

and let’s not forget the ever popular “bug-driven testing”.

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

#362

Post by mooreds »

nobody271 wrote: post #96
mikekchar wrote: post #91

I worked on the DMS switch in Nortel (if PRI broke for you, I'm sorry, I tried my best!). 31 millions lines of absolutely horrific code. You'd think somewhere in that mess there would be some redeeming code, but if there was I never found it. To give you some examples, I originally came on as a contractor because they had some refactoring they wanted done. The entire system was home built (including the programming l…

This one might take the cake. Thanks for sharing.

I agree. It's like a buffet. Multiple stories, each frightening in their own way.

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

#363

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Izkata wrote: post #62
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…

A sentiment among members of a former team was that automated tests meant you didn't need to write understandable code - let the tests do the thinking for you. This, and stuff like your story, are why I don't trust people who promote test-driven development as the best way to write clean APIs.

The problem with TDD is that a dedicated developer can always make a test pass- the how is another matter.

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

#364

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #203
pmarreck wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TDD doesn't think for you, it merely validates your own existing understanding/mental model and forces you to come up with it upfront. This is hardly a thing to be mistrustful about, unless you work with idiots.

ok but from reading a lot of the comments on HN it sounds like many posters here think that they do work with idiots.

Those idiots probably also think the same, though.

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

#365

Post by yarg »

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 don't think it's any of the reasons that you listed. To a large extent, I blame management - they push sub-optimal solutions because it's generally the fastest way to resolve the immediate problem. This generally results in poor solutions being piled up on top of each other that becomes progressively more impossible to maintain.

This despite the fact that if additional time were allocated to come up with a better solution, tomorrow's software would be easier to integrate on top of today's, and with a higher quality of code.

But the reason that managers behave like this is because they can - and this I think has more to do with the ethereal and timeless nature of software than anything else.

In the real world it simply is not possible to put together a physical artifact with the sort of compromised constructs that appears in software.

There are costs of material to consider; costs of production. There's degradation over time.

All of these aspects of physical constructs provide a strong motivation to produce a quality product - not out of beneficence, but because (quality engineers aside) it's cheaper and it's really the only feasible option.

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

#366

Post by api »

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…

Code like this makes me think of the famous line from the film version of Hellraiser: "I have such sights to show you..."

Contrast PostgreSQL or... uhh... virtually any other database. Oracle's mess is clearly a result of bad management, not a reflection of the intrinsic difficulty of the problem domain.

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

#367

Post by api »

The worst I've personally seen was a many tens of millions of lines C++ Qt GUI app. Won't mention the name to protect the guilty but it's something some people here might recognize.

It didn't really need to be that big. A lot of its size was a result of pathological over-engineering. Apparently a previous (of course) engineer who built much of the original app thought boost::bind and functional binding was awesome. He also absolutely loved template meta-programming.

The code base was full of templates that contained templates that contained templates that contained... layers upon layers upon layers of templates, generics, bind, and so on. The horror. The compile times were awesome too. Local builds on an 8-core machine took 15-20 minutes.

I once made a commit to that code base where I replaced two entire subdirectories of files and tens of thousands of lines of code with one function. It took me weeks to understand and then finally to realize that none of it was necessary at all. It was all over-engineering. The function contained a case statement that did the job of layers of boost::bind and other cruft.

I definitely had a net negative line count at that job. The experience helped to solidify my loathing of unnecessary complexity.

It also made me respect languages like Go that purposely do not give the programmer tools like complex templating systems, dynamic language syntax, etc. It's not that these features have no uses, but honestly their uses are few. I've used Go for a while now and have found maybe two instances in tens of thousands of lines where I missed generics. I imagine I'd miss operator overloading in heavy math code, but that's about it. The problem is that these features are dangerous in the hands of "insufficiently lazy" programmers that love to over-engineer. I'd rather not have them and have to kludge just a little than to deal with code bases like the one I described above ever again.

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

#368

Post by gassiss »

Three years ago I was hired as a Business Analyst, with 0 background in anything related to IT. Our team was responsible to maintain a legacy base in COBOL.

As time went by, everything started to make sense and I was able to grasp almost everything about the environment and the tech stack. Even perform a little bit of system analysis in COBOL to try and identify some gaps in the code base.

But what always intrigued me is that even those senior developers in the team with 25+ years of experience with COBOL wouldn't ever touch this one program. The program responsible for 90% of the logic of the product of that company. Every now and then, this program would ABEND for whatever reason and sometime, no one could figure out why. They respected (cute way of saying they were afraid) this program so much that, instead of refactoring it, they would just throw an if statement and let it run.

This program was built in the 60s and had I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It is still running to this day.

Now I don't have the expertise to say if that was bad code, and even if I had, I didn't deal with this program enough to say this anyway, but I was very intrigued why would this particular program ABEND out of nowhere, and no of these super experienced developers would have the guts to touch it.

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

#369

Post by pavel_lishin »

Maro wrote: post #284
nathan_f77 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The best way to guess this is to extrapolate from the interview questions.

Wouldn't you just ask the developers interviewing you outright, "can you walk me through an example of your day? How long does it take you to push out code? What's testing like? Do you run tests locally, or use something like Jenkins?" etc.

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

#370

Post by tomazio »

brianpgordon wrote: post #327
exikyut wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sorts of techniques did they use? I'm very curious to see/hear examples.

function isTrue(v) { var result; result = v; if (!isFalse(result == true)) { return result; } else { return isFalse(result); } } function isFalse(v) { var result; result = v; if (!isTrue(result == true)) { return isFalse(result); // Tail recursion so this is fine. } else { return result; } } if (isTrue(myBool) == true) { // TODO: Could this be refactored to isTrue(isTrue(myBool))? return true; } else if (isTrue(isFal…

This is literally insane.
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