A project with a single 11,000-line code file • Hacker News Board

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#151

Post by kcb » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

khazhoux wrote: post #80

kbrannigan wrote: post #39

So afraid to write bad, spaghetti code, I ended up writing no code at all. This thread made me realize that it's better to have a working profitable project with bad code, than a perfect unfinished project, with meticulously chosen design patterns. Afraid of being judged for bad code, I could not start until I had the right architecture. I'm glad I read this. This is developers therapy.

I've sadly come to realize (after witnessing on many projects) that there's a pattern that goes like this: * Team A writes code quickly. Not bad code, really, but they take shortcuts everywhere they can. They don't have the strongest tests, they don't generalize for all the known use cases, etc. Their code goes to beta and gets users and makes progress. * Team B deliberates and deliberates. They try to avoid taking s…

Something this reminds me of that I've been doing lately when stuck on a particular problem is just coding something. Even if it's the most shittiest, inefficient and naïve solution. More often than not I either discover a more proper solution along the way or just realize my shitty solution actually wasn't all that bad to begin with.

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#152

Post by jbmny » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

kbrannigan wrote: post #105

khazhoux wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've sadly come to realize (after witnessing on many projects) that there's a pattern that goes like this: * Team A writes code quickly. Not bad code, really, but they take shortcuts everywhere they can. They don't have the strongest tests, they don't generalize for all the known use cases, etc. Their code goes to beta and gets users and makes progress. * Team B deliberates and deliberates. They try to avoid taking s…

There's a YouTube video about beginner musicians vs intermediate vs advanced. The beginner uses simple chords The intermediate uses advanced chords, crazy fills and runs and riffs. The advanced uses simple chords

"First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is."

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#153

Post by manquer » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:12 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #136

lanstin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sometimes can. Maybe for any legacy code base someone could, but I have tried and failed on more than one occasion. Some people’s thought process is just perversely different to mine and I keep feeling, oh, this is the layer where that happens, but no every time I have an aha moment I am disillusioned.

If you don't have a test suite, you can't know if you're making progress or making things worse. Learned repeatedly from painful experience.

To develop a comprehensive test suite can sometimes be hard, especially for code that deals with say concurrency, multi threaded code , locks , 2d/3d physics , video , analog , hardware related , procedurally generated or ML (meta-language ) and the other ML (machine learning) etc.

A lot of edge cases and race conditions would easily slip through, also a different set of edge cases or race conditions you never considered and therefore never tested for in your first version could pop up in your rewrite.

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#154

Post by lupire » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #117

userbinator wrote: post #102

I remember many years ago coming across a reimplementation of the server side for a popular MMORPG of the time, reverse-engineered from the client (which was Flash) by what was likely a teenager --- it was over 100k lines in a single file, written in Visual Basic. Global variables everywhere, short names, and not even indentation. All the account data was stored in flat files, there was no actual DB. No "best practic…

Ironically, this is a description of hacker news itself. https://github.com/shawwn/arc/blob/arc3.1/news.arc (HN has indentation, though.) It’s important to realize that this is good design. It’s hard to separate yourself from the time you live in, but the rewards are worthwhile.

2600lines is not 100k lines.

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#155

Post by postalrat » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

voakbasda wrote: post #46

It really speaks to the state of software engineering when there are ample comments here defending this practice. This is virtually indefensible in my book, as it screams technical debt and strongly suggests that there are much deeper issues hiding in that codebase. Personally I would not be willing to work on it without first addressing those issues.

And that's fine. Nobody is qualified to work on every piece of software.

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#156

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

Forge36 wrote: post #142

tokamak-teapot wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably VB.NET? Because the VB6 IDE wouldn’t let you write more than 65534 lines [1]. Don’t ask how I discovered this. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstu...

I too learned this lesson the hard way.

[deleted]

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#157

Post by tonyedgecombe » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

asddubs wrote: post #66

moralestapia wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, reminds me of the meme: var a = true; if(a == true) then return true; else if(a == false) then return false; Or something like that.

i hate to say that I've definitely written code like that. not any time recently, thankfully (at least I think)

The thing is it’s easy to imagine a situation that leads to this. It’s five o’clock on Friday, your partner is hassling you to get home because you have visitors, you are exhausted because you worked 60 hours this week and your boss is breathing down your neck because they want their pet feature finished right now.

This is why I’m always loathe to criticise stuff I see on WTF.

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#158

Post by baggy_trough » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

kcb wrote: post #151

khazhoux wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've sadly come to realize (after witnessing on many projects) that there's a pattern that goes like this: * Team A writes code quickly. Not bad code, really, but they take shortcuts everywhere they can. They don't have the strongest tests, they don't generalize for all the known use cases, etc. Their code goes to beta and gets users and makes progress. * Team B deliberates and deliberates. They try to avoid taking s…

Something this reminds me of that I've been doing lately when stuck on a particular problem is just coding something. Even if it's the most shittiest, inefficient and naïve solution. More often than not I either discover a more proper solution along the way or just realize my shitty solution actually wasn't all that bad to begin with.

Start with the simplest idea that might work.

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#159

Post by lupire » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

iaaan wrote: post #122

cookiengineer wrote: post #71

Back in the days at Zynga, there was this ritual that new members of the STG (Shared Tech Group, which developed the game engine stack) had to try to refactor the road logic code. Suffice it to say, it's a 28k LOC file that was so bad, it could even hold up in court as evidence that a South American company stole the code of Zynga's -ville games. We could reproduce each and every single bug and its effects 1:1 in the…

To be fair, the first step towards refactoring is understanding the existing code -- ideally, knowing everywhere it is used, all of its behaviors, and importantly, its history, so that you don't break anything, and so that you don't reintroduce bugs that have already been fixed over the years. Or, in lieu of all that, a robust automated test suite. This cannot be done with a file containing 28k lines of code. That is…

A 28Kloc file can be modular.

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#160

Post by lupire » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

kolinko wrote: post #84

khazhoux wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've sadly come to realize (after witnessing on many projects) that there's a pattern that goes like this: * Team A writes code quickly. Not bad code, really, but they take shortcuts everywhere they can. They don't have the strongest tests, they don't generalize for all the known use cases, etc. Their code goes to beta and gets users and makes progress. * Team B deliberates and deliberates. They try to avoid taking s…

+1 I had a lot of trouble trying to explain this to juniors. The most important things is to have code that is easy to refactor when you know what you're doing (i.e. everything is working properly). Juniors I worked with had a nasty definition of a pretty code being split into a hundred files, each no longer than a screen, and each function no longer than 5 lines. The onboarding of new devs to such code was way worse…

> The most important things is to have code that is easy to refactor

This whole post is about how refactoring doesn't matter because your project's development lifetime isn't long and wide enough for maintentance to matter.