Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

Post by rossdavidh » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #101

rossdavidh wrote: post #60

The first and most important question is, why does nobody on the team understand it? One possibility, which should not be overlooked, is that it was not quite important enough to spend money on maintaining a team of people who understand it. Just as the Big Rewrite is often not as good an option as it seems, the Big Refactor is often not a good option either, because the software may in fact not be valuable enough to…

I worked for a place where if the decision was between spending X hours now, or spending an unknown number of hours that would be likely to be 5-10x hours at some indeterminate point in the future, they would _always_ kick the can down the road. I can't figure that mentality out, when I would regularly predict trainwrecks and then say, "I told you so." when I turned out to be right, and yet, no one would listen to me…

Post by andjd » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 10:35 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #7

Yes. It was a vital subsystem in a Smalltalk program. While most of the project had passable Object Oriented organization, this one subsystem had zero instance methods and zero instance variables. Instead, it was copy-pasta after slightly modified copy-pasta of these long methods that called each other recursively. Each one of these methods used a "merging" style algorithm that incremented 4 indexes into arrays, all…

Post by jeffwass » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 10:51 PM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #91

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but I've rarely worked on a codebase that _wasn't_ awful in some way, and I am definitely not early in my career. I've come to the conclusion that most programmers are simply awful at their jobs, and the developers that can write clear, concise code are a small minority. I've known a few, but not many.

Especially in big companies it's really hard to keep your code concise. I have often started with a very clean design that totally feel apart when new requirements came in. If you give managers the choice to hack it into the code in 1x time or redesign the code in 2x time most of them will vote for the first option. Go through that cycle a few times and your code will be a big mess

Post by potta_coffee » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 11:08 PM UTC

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #49

This is kind of a cop out IMO. There's got to be some entry point to gain visibility into the code, put a breakpoint there, run in debugger, single step/step over until you get the basic idea of how it flows. I'm speaking from experience, I inherited a project based on TaxiAnytime, aka "Uber App Clone Source Code". What a complete clusterfuck, obviously written in as incomprehensible a style as possible to create att…

Post by j1elo » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 11:23 PM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #91

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but I've rarely worked on a codebase that _wasn't_ awful in some way, and I am definitely not early in my career. I've come to the conclusion that most programmers are simply awful at their jobs, and the developers that can write clear, concise code are a small minority. I've known a few, but not many.

Especially in big companies it's really hard to keep your code concise. I have often started with a very clean design that totally feel apart when new requirements came in. If you give managers the choice to hack it into the code in 1x time or redesign the code in 2x time most of them will vote for the first option. Go through that cycle a few times and your code will be a big mess