Choose one:
Perfect code you never shipped.
Single 11,000 file code you shipped.
A project with a single 11,000-line code file
221–230 of 346 posts
Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's an alternative to files that doesn't just have all the same attributes of files anyway? If it involves breaking code into multiple chunks of related functions, and possibly having these chunks act as namespaces, that sounds like what a file does.
Maybe it's the editors that need updating. It would be pretty neat to have the chunks of functions / namespaces model as lots of tiny separate files on the disk, but a sort of view-layer so that you can view all the related ones in one virtual file. You could even then have multiple virtual files that include the same raw files. For example in a video game your player, monsters, health potions, and attacks could all…
Look up "class browser", in particular "smalltalk class browser" to see examples, current and historic, of editors supporting that kind of approach to navigating codebases.
Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 const…
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Why do you think you can pressure me into accepting your opinions? I don't want to argue with you so how about this - you do it your way and I'll do it my way. But, thanks for your concern.
Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is amazing. Is there a syntax highlighting and linter kind of things for the "Arc" language? If it's possible, I would like to try that. I love how Lisp looks like.
Indeed there is. I've been using this vim plugin for over a decade: https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2720
Which IDE do you like? I'll see about getting some highlighting for it.
As for actually running arc, it’s hard to run the original arc3.1 due to racket updates. I’ve made a few branches over the years that try to preserve the original spirit of arc (no significant changes) while making it easy to run. Try this one:
https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc
I believe you can simply install racket, then run make && bin/arc and be dropped into a repl. From there you can follow the arc tutorial, whose link I’ll dig up after I’m finished driving home.
EDIT: That fork is actually a lot different from arc3.1 proper. I’ll try to locate a more faithful one.
EDIT 2: Unfortunately it's quite a lot of work to remove the mzscheme dependency from the old arc3.1 codebase. And I'm not sure it's even possible to install the mzscheme lib on the latest racket (e.g. `brew install racket` doesn't seem to have it).
So the above instructions are the best I can do for now.
Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is amazing. Is there a syntax highlighting and linter kind of things for the "Arc" language? If it's possible, I would like to try that. I love how Lisp looks like.
Indeed there is. I've been using this vim plugin for over a decade: https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2720 Which IDE do you like? I'll see about getting some highlighting for it. As for actually running arc, it’s hard to run the original arc3.1 due to racket updates. I’ve made a few branches over the years that try to preserve the original spirit of arc (no significant changes) while making it easy to…
I use Visual studio code, I couldn't find it in Extensions. I'm just asking out of curiosity, What do you develop with Arc usually?
I like how the "html" and "css" part was embedded in that "news.arc" file. Do you think that VIM script will highlight and lint the "css" part of an "arc" file?
Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file
#226I 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.
I'm not seeing the irony. The file you linked to is only ~2600 lines of code and seems to be well-modularized and fairly well commented. Assuming that's the whole site, I think that's pretty reasonable.
Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file
#227Those are rookie #'s, I have had php code doing mostly sql migration work in PDO twice that length in a single file :)
Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file
#228Back 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…
It's impossible to refactor spaghetti code without a comprehensive test suite. But you can do it with a test suite - I've done it with large code bases.
My experience as well. Also the main recommendation from the most excellent “Working with legacy code” book.
Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file
#229Earlier 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…
It might sometimes be hard but I have never seen a case where it was impossible (25+ years of experience dealing with undocumented legacy code more often than not).
Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file
#230Modularity applies at different levels and the purpose of modularity varies according to the level. Code can be modular at one level and not modular at another. Functional, domain knowledge, deployability, organisational alignment (e.g. operational support and maintainability), etc
I see lots of people getting confused these days about modularity and people missing the point altogether. What is it you're after? What's most important to you? That's where you need to focus your modularity efforts.