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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?

#471

Post by CoolGuySteve »

alexeiz wrote: post #425
oraguy wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, the interview was an ordinary one. The screening round consisted of very basic fizzbuzz type coding ability checks: Reversing a linked list, finding duplicates in a list, etc. Further rounds of interviews covered data structure problems (trees, hashtables, etc.), design problems, scalability problems, etc. It was just like any other interview for software engineering role.

"Well, your interviews went quite well. Now the final question: what would you do if you start losing your mind?"

"I'd like you to write a graph algorithm that traverses the abyss, the cosmic horror that consumes one's mind, that traverses twilight to the rim of morning, that sees the depths of man's fundamental inability to comprehend.

Oh ya, the markers in here are pretty run down, let me pray to the old ones for some more"

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

#472

Post by kazinator »

acroback wrote: post #415
Izkata wrote: post #62

Earlier 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…

The problem with TDD is that the methodology wants to cover every change, no matter how internal, with some sort of external test.

Some changes are simply not testable, period.

No, you cannot always write a test which initially fails, and then passes when the change is made, and when this is the case. You should understand why that is, and not try.

In some cases when you can, yet still should not. If a whole module is rewritten such that the new version satisfies all of the public contracts with the rest of the code, then only those contracts need to be retested; we don't need new tests targeting internals.

It's because the old version wasn't targeted by such tests in the first place that it can be rewritten without upheaval.

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

#473

Post by hjek »

badjobthrowaway wrote: post #389

(I am a regular of HN. I don't want this attributed to my acct.) Previous job. Was sysad. This code runs most of the academic US internet. Everything was Perl5. There were over 150 different major applications written with it, ranging from 40 lines to 500k lines. The older the recent commit, the worse. Touching any of this would cause errors, either in itself OR in associated applications! You'd be working on thing A…

> 2. Goober had the idea of storing pictures in said MySQL database. 70 GB of pics...

Is that really a bad idea? The pics would not be any smaller outside the database.

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

#474

Post by doctorless »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #471
alexeiz wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Well, your interviews went quite well. Now the final question: what would you do if you start losing your mind?"

"I'd like you to write a graph algorithm that traverses the abyss, the cosmic horror that consumes one's mind, that traverses twilight to the rim of morning, that sees the depths of man's fundamental inability to comprehend. Oh ya, the markers in here are pretty run down, let me pray to the old ones for some more"

Pretty sure I was asked that question in an Amazon interview.

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

#475

Post by humbledrone »

alexbecker wrote: post #200
humbledrone wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, branches break down badly when you have many experiments. You end up with a bunch of incompatible versions of the system that you need to merge together later which can be a huge mess (depending on the size of the changes).

By all means, branches are great for super-prototypey early code, but once you know that you want to keep the ability to run the experiment around, guard it with a flag and merge it into mainline to avoid nightmare merges later!

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

#476

Post by yellowapple »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #426
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…

You've violated the terms of service of Oracle Database by insinuating the codebase quality is in any way not superior to any and all competitors. No benchmarks or comparisons may be performed on the Oracle Database Product under threat of grave bodily harm at the discretion of our very depraved CEO.

I can hear the clamoring of lawyers eager to fundraise for Larry's next flying sailboat.

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

#477

Post by castathrowaway »

api wrote: post #366
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.

The KDB+ database has been around for 20 years.

The executable is ~ 500kb.

Enterprise software is gross.

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

#478

Post by Endy »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #369
Maro wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most new hires are probably not being interviewed by devs, but either by 3rd-party recruiters or internal recruiters with HR. When I was working in recruiting, the last thing either we or the client wanted was for the new hire to talk to either the person who they were replacing or any of the potential coworkers. Heck, one internal recruiter I had to interface with at a company I choose not to disclose said to me, "can we ask if they read Hacker News? There's some bad vibes about us there."

Which is when I got back on HN regularly :-)

(PS I did tell the internal person that there was no way that reading HN was related either to a BFOQ or other job requirement; and thus while it's not illegal, it'd be highly suspicious.)

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

#479

Post by ternaryoperator »

api wrote: post #366
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.

Nonsense. The problem domain you dismiss is hideously complicated. Oracle DB and PostgreSQL are entirely different classes of products. No airline runs its reservation system on PostreSQL. That's not a coincidence.

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

#480

Post by exikyut »

wcarss wrote: post #10

Years 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…

Waited a bit for this question to pop up, but it didn't, to my surprise. So:

> ...remote-debugging the windows draw code with no symbols

Why, specifically, were no symbols available? I can't come up with an explanation. Surely old symbols are kept. Do checked builds take longer to iterate on (ie build), or something?

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