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

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

#181

Post by wsc981 » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:48 PM UTC

gridspy wrote: post #141

jokethrowaway wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad reality of tech companies is that there is little incentive or bonuses for improving the situation. You won't get a bonus for cleaning up the code or for rewriting rotten code. Hack at the code for 4 years, collect your options and leave the mess to someone else. To be honest, a hacky codebase written fast is not the worst codebase to deal with. The worst type is when someone had the time to overarchitect and…

> The worst type is when someone had the time to overarchitect and overengineer things. I concur. Refactoring should be as much about removing unneeded abstraction and features as it is about adding same. > there is little incentive or bonuses for improving the situation. Yeah, I just can't seem to believe this in my soul. I just want to fix ugly code and can't stop myself. I get huge satisfaction from speeding up, t…

I try to sneak in refactoring with other tasks.

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

#182

Post by civilized » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:48 PM UTC

aaronchall wrote: post #82

civilized wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love to complain about things that are simple, fast, and easy to complain about, without regard to whether the complaint is insightful or useful. It's sort of the dark twin of bikeshedding. If you divide the single 11k-line file into a thousand 11-line files, it may become objectively much harder to understand, but it'll also receive much less flak, guaranteed. I suspect this is also why Architecture Astronaut…

If you divide a single 11k-line file into 20 files averaging 550 lines per each, by semantics and levels of abstraction, your code will quite possibly be easier to read, maintain and add to. Maybe. Perhaps.

I mostly agree, but it's often not that big a deal, and some people and applications may favor bigger files.

I have a 4000-line script in a single file that has served me very well. It's perfectly organized and modular. I thought about breaking it into more files but it seemed pointless. It's very convenient for jumping through every mention of a variable, for example.

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

#183

Post by vsareto » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:51 PM UTC

tokamak-teapot wrote: post #120

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…

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...

>Don’t ask how I discovered this.

Like most of the world at one point, it ran on Excel 2003

/s

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

#184

Post by _joel » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:54 PM UTC

thedanbob wrote: post #8

I once inherited a mission-critical PHP project which had no version control, no tests, and no development environment (all edits were made directly on the server). It used a custom framework of the original author’s own devising which made extensive use of global variables and iframes and mostly lived in several enormous PHP files. I was able to clean it up somewhat, but there was one particularly important file tha…

It wasn't mission critical but my very first production programming project (n.b. I'm not a programmer and never had any classical training or education as one) was an abomination. I'd like to think the realisation of how bad it was, despite it just about working, was a call to arms to up my game a little. I ended up learning a lot about data structures, writing understandable code and comment, when not to write code, all that OOP stuff and things like STI, Generics (still not sure what they are), testing (TDD AND BDD!!! Yea, Cucumber!) and a plethora of other useful things.

I'm still not a programmer.

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

#185

Post by irrational » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:55 PM UTC

I once wrote a sql query that was (well, is, since it is still in use) 5,000 lines long. It still ran in less than a millisecond, but I was surprised how long it really was once it was finished and tested.

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

#186

Post by Aardwolf » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #37

ben_w wrote: post #9

That beats the 1000 lines inside a single if {} block that I once found. (The conditional in that if {} always evaluated to true).

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.

else throw "this should never happen";

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

#187

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:58 PM UTC

manquer wrote: post #153

WalterBright wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consid…

Of course. But dealing with that is why we get paid the big bucks.

I've dealt with concurrency issues. grep is a handy tool to find related synchronization code, then I try to replace it with an encapsulation. In general, I look for things I can replace with algorithms, and things I can encapsulate. And so on.

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

#188

Post by hahamrfunnyguy » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 10:58 PM UTC

I worked on a project like this once. If I remember correctly, it was even larger than 11,000 lines. ASP classic project with VB-script. We tried to get the company to do an overhaul, but it was more cost effective to try building it into the existing system.

After the better part of a week becoming acquainted with the code, I found a suitable integration point. Luckily for me, the new feature being requested didn't depend too much on the existing code so I didn't have to make too many modifications to the existing code. I added the entry point to the new section along with some comments describing how things worked and some ascii art of a dragon. In the end, the new feature worked great and the customer was very happy with the results.

Some years later, I was working for a different consulting firm and that project surfaced again. This time it was being re-written in ASP .NET after being passed around to a couple of different off-shore development teams. My coworker was working on it and asked me if I had written a specific piece of code in index.asp. I took a look and we both had a laugh, because my ascii survived after all those years!

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

#189

Post by 88913527 » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 11:02 PM UTC

notreallyserio wrote: post #135

wk_end wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this dichotomy is helpful. I’m presently working at a startup that’s trying to dig itself out of a hole created by the first CTO, who in doing things “quickly” created an MVP so buggy, inefficient, crash-prone, and unmaintainable that we can’t retain customers or engineers. As always, there’s a balance to be struck, and ways to operate quickly that don’t sacrifice quality too much.

I'm kind of surprised that you can't find engineers interested in creating a new implementation of an existing application that is actually used by people. I think that might be my dream role.

At the risk of crushing your dream role, re-implementations can be long slogs. I'm in the middle of one right now. The Product owners don't know what the thing does. The engineers who originally wrote it are gone, and their replacements are relatively new to the codebase. The bright side is customers are hugely interested in our progress to date and we've received positive feedback. The business wishes we could move faster.

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

#190

Post by profile53 » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

It's worth an honorable mention toward the 47,000 line file containing the entire garbage collector for the C# runtime. It was originally written in lisp, then automatically translated to C++ by a script before .net was released. It's been hand maintained since and the folks at Microsoft have rejected attempts to refactor the code.