Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

austinhenley.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 346 posts

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

#281

Post by KwisaksHaderach »

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…

See also Bellard's QuickJS (54k lines) https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bellard/quickjs/master/qui...

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

#282

Post by z3t4 »

branko_d wrote: post #245
z3t4 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but for API calls and databases, just have the test write to the prod environment, but include rollback/cleanup in the test I disagree with that. Automated testing should be done on a test database. Holding a lock for too long could effectively block the entire production. This could happen while debugging through a test (e.g. by hitting a breakpoint or by just stepping line-by-line). Or by simply having a bug in t…

It can be a lot of work creating an isolated dev/test environment if you already have a large app that communicate with a lot of services. But if you can that is preferable as the test will create strange artifacts - but those systems is probably someone elses job to make sure they dont get corrupted ;)

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

#283

Post by bjarneh »

I worked one year with "accounting software". The single-file-VBS-approach was almost all I ever saw. Anyone who knows anything about software development quits, and those who don't stay there and fiddle more with the incomprehensible 11.000 line VBS script to try to figure out why nobody born before 1981 didn't get their salary paid out last month...

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

#285

Post by jordanmaulana »

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…

Plus.. When someone from Team B initiate the code, with hundreds of files & massive boilerplate, can't continue the work for a reason (e.g: sick / resign), this new dev who take the position will require super long time just to understand the code. Some of them will eventually writing their own, instead of following existing code standards, leading to have multiple standards at 1 project and resulting hell if it runs into trouble..

Also when someone from Team A initiate the code and Team B takes over, there were few times that Team B feels like the code is damn no good and just massively refactor it with what they think is good (re: the boilerplate) without others' concern. Then when Team B leaves, it goes to 1st paragraph..

I think as a team we need to consider the learning curve of our own code cz we don't code for ourselves.. And it's good to know the tolerance & acceptance to 'structure' of the code from other people..

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

#286

Post by Mawr »

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…

There's being uncharitable and then there's this.

Your entire point rests on a baseless assumption. There's absolutely nothing in the parent's post that indicates that the programs he would create could have the potential to harm humans.

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

#287

Post by shakna »

bbkane wrote: post #264
shakna wrote: post #55

I learned that not all text editors go to the effort of loading the file data very carefully with careful underlying data structures when I tried to open a 67K LOC COBOL file on a 32bit system, a while back. (Sidenote: COBOL has a 999,999 LOC hard limit in the compiler spec.) So very many editors just couldn't open it. Some would use so much memory that the system would either freeze, or the OS would kill them. Some…

What editors ended up working?

> There were exactly three editors I found at the time that worked (none of which were graphical editors). And they worked without any increased latency, letting you know that the developers just thought through what they were doing: vim, emacs, nano.

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

#288

Post by cbanek »

I'll never forget the compiler bug we found once. We had a precompiled header file that was over 65,536 lines, and for some reason, it would just stop reading after that many lines. Of course we had some interesting compiler errors, but we never expected that it was a compiler bug.

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

#289

Post by cbanek »

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...

Came here looking for this. <3

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

#290

Post by cormacrelf »

lordnacho wrote: post #28

No doubt dozens of devs will throw in their own 10k LOC story here, and yes it's painful to watch so many people having professional cramps over it. But don't forget society itself if governed by OOM larger bits of text with no referential integrity, no machine to tell you if it's inconsistent, and no way to test anything, other than making humans write more text to each other and occasionally show up in court. The l…

You are wrong to say there's no way to test anything. Imagine an enormous AI generating test cases for you constantly, in an adversarial fashion, with built-in rewards for advancing a more correct understanding of the text. Lawyers call this "testing", rightly so. If you are interested in efficiency / cost-effectiveness, it's got lots to be desired. But if you are interested in the internal integrity of the document etc, then this is better than almost anything developers have.

I hate these words as I type them but the law is also "agile" (ugh). It gets modified as it's used. It does not need high-assurance machine-verified "referential integrity". In my entire course of studying the law I don't think I've seen a single legal dispute over a problem of referential integrity. Mistakes, especially drafting mistakes, are corrected on the fly pretty much everywhere they appear, and then they disappear. For a dev, using the wrong variable name in a bad language could mean you introduce a huge security vulnerability and massive loss of trust. (Or if you write smart contracts, $100M down the drain.) For lawyers, referring to the wrong section has essentially zero consequences. Nobody cares. Maybe you get a funny look from a senior.

Finally re the 10k LOC tangent that this is supposed to be connected to, I'm not really sure what you're complaining about. You get "10kLOC" cases, but you also get well-organised practice guides & bench books. Laws in statute are typically very well organised, in my experience about 5-10x better than the average codebase. Laws are organising large swaths of the sum total of human endeavour, just as code does. I would say developers are behind overall, which makes sense for a discipline that's less than a century old.

Post reply on HN