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

austinhenley.com

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

#201

Post by civilized »

smegsicle wrote: post #78
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…

> dark twin of bikeshedding is it different from regular bikeshedding? or are you saying that the dark twin is the evolutionary process of eg. architecture gaining complexity until it becomes difficult to criticize..

Bikeshedding is usually more about how something should be done than how it should not be done. But, yes, you could think of them as basically one thing.

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

#203

Post by z3t4 »

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…

It is possible to write tests in a single-file program. You could for example have a -test flag that runs all the tests when the program starts. It's never too late to introduce tests - the next bug you fix, start by writing a test that detects the bug, then fix the bug - and confirm that the bug is fixed by running the test. Then you never have to worry about a bug you already fixed will show up again. And the tests will build up to a decent test suit over time. The next step is to also write a new test for each new change or feature. Keep doing this and your program will soon have full test coverage. The trick is to not test small units - instead write the tests as if a user was using the program, so that the actual tests covers a lot of code all over the place, not just the code you added. Mock key presses, and button presses. Then when a user reports a bug, you can write the test so that it repeats the user actions.

What makes testing hard is a lot of side effects, like the program writing to databases or calling external API's. Not the LOC of the source file. You might want to mock an automatic call to the fire department for a fire control program, but for API calls and databases, just have the test write to the prod environment, but include rollback/cleanup in the test. That way you don't need a separate testing environment.

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

#204

Post by rezonant »

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…

I suspect the game was Runescape. My brother used to be a fan of these custom servers.

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

#205

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#206

Post by hzhou321 »

> Once I dared to clean this up and reuse the authentication response, but it broke everything. I never figured out why. To this day I sometimes lie in bed wondering what could have caused this.

Is it just me that get piqued by the sound of it? I often spend my night figuring something intriguing and chasing that aha moment. I also like play puzzle games, and to me, its one way or another to spend the time. Then if I get to clean the mess up, usually that's another rewarding effort. However, I definitely understand the frustrations if one's hands are tied or there is a deadline that you just want it disappear.

I love to clean up my own mess as well. We all make messes, at different levels and at different perspectives. Just like playing a game, it is just boss fight at different level. Novices make mess, veterans make mess as well. Usually novice's mess are easy mess.

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

#207

Post by bpicolo »

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.

> it's better to have a working profitable project with bad code, than a perfect unfinished project, with meticulously chosen design patterns.

A lot of businesses were built on PHP this way

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

#208

Post by passivate »

29athrowaway wrote: post #170
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.

Restaurant industry version: I was so afraid to cook in a dirty kitchen, I ended up not cooking at all. This thread made me realize that's better to sell food prepared on dirty surfaces with unrefrigerated ingredientes half-eaten by rodents and roaches that makes people sick, than fresh food prepared on clean surfaces with clean utensils. I'm glad I read this. This is a restaurant worker story. Construction industry…

Your analogy is flawed. The CPU doesn't care at all about how or what code looks like, all the nice comments explaining what it does, nice naming conventions, whether its easy to understand or not. They have zero impact on the final compiled code. The executable ends up as a spaghetti of machine instructions with countless gotos in a single large file.

Using bad ingredients in food, or poor quality materials in construction has tremendous impact on the final product.

>"Better is the enemy of the worse" is no excuse to have spaghetti code, or 50,000 lines of code files. It means that good is sometimes more convenient than perfect. Spaghetti code is not good to begin with.

Just calling code good or bad doesn't mean much - ultimately, results matter - if your code doesn't have tons of bugs, if your team can add features without any problems, if you can ship reasonably on time, if your product delivers value to the end user, etc - then you have succeeded. It doesn't matter what outsiders think about the code or what labels people give. Its best to ignore them and continue doing good work.

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

#209

Post by squeaky-clean »

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.

The Player controller from the game Celeste is a single 5600 line file that includes things like systems only used in the tutorial. I honestly don't think it's as bad as some of the criticism it got when the code was released makes it seem, but it certainly could be better looking code.

But ultimately, Maddy Thorson isn't selling a block of code. They're selling a game and it has extremely satisfying control of the character. And that's all that really matters for a player controller.

Maybe better organization and design patterns could have made it faster to develop? But I don't believe it would.

But also the type of product does matter for this. Celeste had 2 programmers so a lot of the things necessary for a team of 100 devs would just be harmful. If you're making a library/framework to be used and modded by others, architecture matters a lot more. If you're designing an enterprise application that you know will need business logic customizations for 25 business customers it matters more. It's all about knowing the scope of your project. But also until you start getting that many customers, maybe the unsustainable method is what will allow you to reach those first few sales more quickly to be able to stay in business long enough to be bit by the technical debt.

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

#210

Post by moralestapia »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #157
asddubs wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I could totally conceive places where "you have to write at least N lines of code per day" and then this kind of thing explains itself.
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