Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/303/
There's an xkcd comic for everything.
There just needs to be an xkcd about the "xkcd comic for everything" meme and the holographic simulated universe will come to completion.
Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
411–420 of 601 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#412Years ago as an intern at Microsoft, I had code go into the Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, and shared Office code. Excel is an incomprehensible maze of #defines and macros, PowerPoint is a Golden Temple of overly-object-oriented insanity, and Word is just so old and brittle you'd expect it to turn to dust by committing. There are "don't touch this!"-like messages left near the main loop _since roughly 1990_. I had…
1990 you say.... maybe the programmer was just an MC Hammer fan.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#413I 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…
If you've made a long distance call at any point in the last 20 years (including today) you have decent odds that the call went thru a DMS.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hell for the proactive go-getters, but paradise for people who enjoy any excuse for a bit of justifiable down time! Q: Are you busy? A: Yes, in the middle of running tests...
That would have been fun but in reality there was no downtime. Developers like me were expected to work on two to three bugs/features at a time and context switch between them. If I submit my test jobs today to the farm, the results would come one or two days later, so I work on another bug tomorrow, and submit that. Day after tomorrow, I return to the first bug, and so on.
I understand. It was partially a tongue in cheek remark :)
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#415Oracle 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.
TDD need to die.
This is a curse.
There should be integration tests along with some property based tests and fuzzy tests. Usually catches a lot of things.Invest in monitoring and alerts too.
TDD is like relying on debugger to solve your problem. Is debugger a good tool? yes,it is a great tool. But using it as an excuse to avoid understanding what happens under the hood is plain wrong.
The problem lies in industry where software engineering is not given any value but whoteboarding and solving puzzles is.
Software engineering is a craft honed over years of making mistakes and learning from them. You want code asap, kick experience engineers get codemonkeys in and get a MVP.
Quality is not clever algorithm, but clear conscise logic. Code should follow the logic, not the other way around.
Clear > clever.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#416At my first gig I teamed up with a guy responsible for a gigantic monolith written in Lua. Originally, the project started as a little script running in Nginx. Over the course of several years, it organically grew to epic proportions, by consuming and replacing every piece of software that it interfaced with - including Nginx. There were two ingredients in the recipe for disaster. The first is that Lua comes "batteri…
I've seen personal reality building happen in Lua several times already. It's very seductive to intelligent solo artists who are given a lot of freedom. To be fair, I've also seen it happen in C, C++, and JavaScript.
Ruby as well. I went down that path once. I learned my lesson.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least there are tests!
Tests that run for 30 hours is an indication that nobody bothered writing unittests. If you need to run all tests after changing X, it means X is NOT tested. Instead you need to rely on integrations tests catching Xs behavior.
If you're only writing tests at the unit level, you might as well not bother. And it's always good to run all tests after any change, it's entirely too easy for the developer to have an incomplete understanding of the implications of a change. Or for another developer to misuse other functionality, deliberately or otherwise.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
TDD need to die. This is a curse. There should be integration tests along with some property based tests and fuzzy tests. Usually catches a lot of things.Invest in monitoring and alerts too. TDD is like relying on debugger to solve your problem. Is debugger a good tool? yes,it is a great tool. But using it as an excuse to avoid understanding what happens under the hood is plain wrong. The problem lies in industry whe…
I’m sympathetic but this is too strong: what needs to die is dogma. TDD as a way of thinking about the API you’re writing is good but anything will become a problem if you see it as a holy cause rather than a tool which is good only to the extent that it delivers results.
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
TDD need to die. This is a curse. There should be integration tests along with some property based tests and fuzzy tests. Usually catches a lot of things.Invest in monitoring and alerts too. TDD is like relying on debugger to solve your problem. Is debugger a good tool? yes,it is a great tool. But using it as an excuse to avoid understanding what happens under the hood is plain wrong. The problem lies in industry whe…
What about TDD requires not understanding the code?
Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd take something less fictionally dramatic and more along the lines of reality TV (ala home makeovers/Kitchen Nightmares/Bar Rescue): a team of crack engineers untangling the mess and laying out the best practices for future development. The concept is even ripe for booze sponsorship.