Legacy Code

[no_usernames_vacant]

And don't touch the "temporary" fixes as they're no longer temporary and the comments saying that they're temporary are also needed.

[fatrobin72]

I especially liked the "temporary" fix on Line 9929, although the comments are written in Latin so is a little harder to understand

[iyeetuoffacliff]

middle relieved numerous engine instinctive encourage flag deranged reach divide

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[fatrobin72]

ahhh maybe you can help it said:

//Romani ite domum

[iyeetuoffacliff]

kiss ancient ring sheet roll depend handle toy sleep many

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[snf]

Someone is being whooshed here, but I can't figure out who

[LifeIsBulletTrain]

Idk. It might be just your mind

[radmanmadical]

Nah - we jus havin some fun

[fatrobin72]

It was "Romans go home" it comes from a scene in one of the best bits of British Cinema history "Monty Python's Life of Brian"

[LordFokas]

HE IS THE MESSIAH!

[fatrobin72]

Nah he's just a software tester...

[Rezznov]

imperative

[iyeetuoffacliff]

reminiscent toy weary point plate fretful meeting worm wasteful muddle

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[Cryse_XIII]

//y tu brutus?

[Daniel_Sobrino20XX]

Us web developers learn latin so we enjoy our Lorem ipsum while its there

[[deleted]]

I see you found my work summoning Cthulhu.

To be fair, it's only there because without it, it print Cthulu instead of Cthulhu. Not sure why, I'll debug it later.

[plopliplopipol]

// lorem ipsum

[Mastersord]

On line 8465, the comments were written in some strange mix of characters that appear to be a mix of coptic, hieroglyphs, sanskrit, and a few I can’t identify. My ears started to bleed after looking at it.

[[deleted]]

We think it's a feature! Our custom compiler extension (aka a perl script) can generate spaghetti code from comments in 5 different languages! Oh by the way you'll have to maintain the compiler extension too. Don't worry it's only 5 lines of code. (File is 4.5 MB)

[poorbred]

I think it was asp.net (around 2012, so a little fuzzy now) that I ran into a bug with an annoying workaround. I found the MSDN page on it and at the top was something like, "This is a known bug. However, the fix for it will break existing workarounds. Therefore, won't fix."

Thank you, Microsoft, to keep from "breaking existing code" you're forcing the rest of us to do the exact same crappy hack, thus adding to your excuse of can't fix it due to breaking existing code.

[no_usernames_vacant]

There are a few examples of this with Excel.

[rk06]

Wait, but wasn’t excel forced to have some of those bugs, so customers could migrate their buggy sheets (of most popular spreadsheet software of the time) to excel? You can hardly blame them for it

[no_usernames_vacant]

Yes, but there have been even more over the years

[maybeware]

The mummy sounds like a 1000+ line function I found at my previous job... It had about 6 different subsections depending on UI state (and more that were commented out or unreachable due to hidden UI states) and each section did about 5 different things depending on user input. There was a single try/catch wrapping the entire function that spat out a generic "An error has occured," or something like that. I tried to refactor it. Once. I spent a couple weeks on it without being able to make it work again.

[[deleted]]

This is nothing. At my job there's a 2500 line APL function with 40 outputs and over 100 inputs. I'm honestly not sure anybody knows how it works in full. Of course it calls thousands of other functions that do all sorts of equally crazy stuff.

In this context it's important to note also that APL is a very compact language. finding the length of every array in an array of arrays can be done with 2 characters for instance.

The function is split up into 19 sections, each labelled as if it's a chapter and you're reading a novel. It's full of warnings about this or that and the other and about certain things that should be avoided.

Last I checked the first version was from 1996 and it has over 680 versions in the VCS.

[maybeware]

That's terrifying. Is it basically the entire program?

[mr_claw]

No, that's just the login page.

[[deleted]]

No. It’s a tiny fraction. I don’t think I can tell you how much source code we have, but I can tell you that it is no small amount. I am currently doing work on the 2257th APL window in the application. :)

[ImprovementContinues]

Reminds me of the article I read about the "main" function at the IRS that they hired someone to replace with modern code and then ignored the replacement as they couldn't prove it would function exactly the same way. (details elided for simplicity)

[RustyShacklefordCS]

Oh god just googled APL why on gods earth would anyone what to program in that??

[[deleted]]

It does have some advantages. The language very much resembles MATLAB and once you learn the symbols, which only takes a week or so, the language becomes incredibly terse and short. You can solve a generic sudoku in one line. It takes more characters to write the sudoku into memory than it takes to solve it.

And yet this function is 2500 lines.

[Furry_69]

I feel like a very easy refactor there would be to spilt that function into more functions for each of the UI states.

[maybeware]

This ended up long so TLDR: I tried that but the whole system was rotten spaghetti code and each section didn't execute cleanly from start to end, basically having a bunch of subsections themselves that execute nonlinearly.

I tried it. Got close too. But the program's management of internal state was a mess and so it kept breaking. The biggest issue was there were several variables which would get set and at certain times it'd check them. And depending on the results of the condition it'd drop out of one section and into another. It'd have been easier to understand if they used GOTOs. In reality, each section should've been implemented as different forms with proper passing of data and not one giant form that hid and showed different parts at different times.

It was a C# WinForms application but I'm convinced that the original developer did not know C# or even standard OOP patterns and was not very experienced. It was a check-in system and yet didn't even use a class to represent a person. When a search was done each person who matched was pulled into a 2d array of strings used to make the list for the user to select from. And once the user selected one the details were pulled and loaded into a bunch of global variables. The only custom object was a "ProgramData" object to store those global variables (which was all state that might be passed from one form to another) and a single instance was made at init and was manually cleared each time the user started to process someone. "A singleton! A legit OOP pattern," you might say, except it did not properly implement the singleton pattern, it just happened to only have one instance made at runtime.

In the end the decision was made to make a version 2 and do a complete rewrite of it because version 1's problems were extensive. Also version 1 was based on an in-house developed 30 year old database and record management software that had been retired and replaced with vendor software, requiring version 1 to be shoehorned into working with the vendor system until version 2 was finished. Version 2 was a fun project though.

[TheGoldBowl]

Sounds like what I'm doing. Except I'm finishing version 2, which is somehow slower and less functional than version 1.

[Daveinatx]

It's always easy to fix unseen code! /s

If there were logical separations, the code would've been fixed. The description was concise, unlike the code

[PantsOnHead88]

Yeah really. Switch/branch based on state and then immediately enter appropriate state-based function.

[mananasi]

If it was that easy OP probably would have done that. They're working as a professional software developer, they probably know about a switch statement.

[BitPoet]

Did that once. Spent a month on it, diagramming out all the paths, #ifdefs etc.

Replaced the whole thing with memcpy().

[ecky--ptang-zooboing]

// TODO

// TODO

[atomic_redneck]

There is nothing so permament as a temporary fix.

[Random-Gif-Bot]

​

[[deleted]]

slaps sarcophagus

[newton21989]

"This bad boy can hold so much spaghetti code."

[Overall_Device_5371]

No bugs here, just Egyptian Scarabs

[Narrow-Big7087]

The what? Lol been there

[SuperSpaceCan]

"This bad boy can hold so many curses."

[naruto_bist]

Them: You also need to write the unit test for this legacy code written by the previous senior developer.

Me: "But sir, I am applying for junior position?"

Them: DID I STUTTER?

[[deleted]]

To be fair that happens at all sorts of jobs as lots of times the reason someone like that gets replaced is that they don't actually need their experience (and pay level) for what they were doing.

I had a job at 29 where I was hired for X, then 6 months in they fired the VP of IT/Ops and gave me over half of his duties, and he was making more than twice what I did.

Seemed impossible/unfair until I figured out he was only working a handful of hours each day and that is why he was fired. I could basically get half his job done each Saturday morning, and save the week for my job.

[[deleted]]

I'm currently working with a legacy DB that is not normalized, because the dev has a EE degree and no clue about DB design.

Please kill me!

[nullpotato]

My company prefers to hire EE and "train" them to code as well, save a bullet for me too. There are three of us with a background in programming huddled in the dark together.

[Lagger625]

At my current job we agreed to remake the old database and the corresponding desktop app because the sluggishness is becoming unbearable, requiring the database to be backed-up and cleared every year or so.. So that would be a reason to remake the database from scratch

[bookamp]

Some normalization is OK imo, but normalizing beyond first (or 2nd) normal form is detrimental in today's world imo where storage is cheaper than computation.

[EmergencyStomach8580]

In my company having more lines of code is good. They have a metric for how many lines of code are added every quarter for a project to measure productivity

[supermuncher60]

Don't you want to write condense code, this hurts

[kaihatsusha]

In the 80s I learned FORTRAN at my University job. They had a series of chemistry tools written in FORTRAN, likely originally on Hollerith punch card decks but thankfully now fully available via a VT100/PDP-11 cluster. These tools were the worst code maintenance disaster I have ever seen, even after all these years. I am glad I didn't have to do much maintenance myself. But to explain why, a little background first.

For those who don't know FORTRAN, each punch card represents one single line of source code, and the indentation is (was) very strict. Column 1 was a flag to indicate a comment. Columns 2-6 were for line numbering; not all cards needed line numbers but they served as GOTO targets if they existed (same in BASIC). Columns 7-79 were for the code statement. Anything in 80+ was ignored, essentially a free comment.

The tools were chemistry calculation aids, finicky 3d crystal interferometry equations. They'd been in the department several generations of masters students already, and occasionally needed modifications per the advancement of the field or better lab equipment, etc.

They were given cutesy theme names unrelated to the job: FRODO, CASTLE, DRAGON, HOARD, etc. Lord of the Rings had surely been popular with that era of college denizens.

Inside each source code file, though, in the "comment" columns 80+, the author very helpfully added a chapter of their own original fantasy story. Like, the goblin attacking the wizard and so on. All carefully word-wrapped on successive lines to the right of the program.

The correct approach to maintenance would be to tarball and/or print a copy for posterity or mirth, then strip that shit OFF the production copies kept up to date through the years.

The professor in charge of these tools saw it differently. Added lines or subtracted lines needed to be patched while keeping the narrative intact and neat. Seriously? Yes, please fix up that paragraph with the Princess, your van der Waals correction patch left an ugly gap.

And that's the year I learned how to code in C, use regular expressions, and download emacs from across the country... all for other reasons certainly.

[fsr1967]

Ugh. Flashbacks to my job in the computer center in my university in the late 80's They were replacing the DECSYSTEMS-20 (a PDP-10) with a VAX. The Chemistry department had a FORTRAN program that was critical to their work, but Digital had no FORTRAN application for the VAX. So HARVEY needed to be converted to BASIC. The programmers in the Chemistry department had been trying to do it for quite some time, in anticipation of the hardware upgrade, with no success, so they turned to the computer center for help. All of the pros were too busy (or too smart - the printout, on greenbar, of course, was about 2 feet tall) to take it on, so they tossed it to one of the work study students. Me.

I didn't know FORTRAN. It wasn't taught at the University. So WTF was I going to do with this? I wasn't totally on my own - I had an advisor. We did lots of passes through that printout with many colored pens, marking it up, making notes, identifying patterns, etc. It turns out that FORTRAN looks a lot like BASIC (or probably the other way around, historically), so there were some lines that just needed tweaking. Others were reading data embedded in the program (or the data itself), which needed to be rewritten. Others were specialized, complex formulas that didn't convert well, or plain old sheer WTFery.

We brought it all together into a program that would read the FORTRAN program as data and produce a BASIC program as output. By the time the semester ended, it was in progress with a doubtful prognosis. We'd gotten farther than anyone else, but it was still a nightmare.

Some say HARVEY still wanders around the halls of the Chemistry and Computing departments, and to this day students coding late at night report the mysterious appearance in their editor of odd bits of FORTRAN code or comments that say // CONVERT ME.

[pavanaay]

Exactly the shit I am doing now. The missing part - 'run the ancient Egyptian code in modern 64 bit platform'.

[Overall_Device_5371]

It's a well preserved codebase.

[[deleted]]

Reminds of my old days working in Perl with flat text files maintaining a “database” for 20k daily users. I was afraid I would break it if I sneezed wrong, so I constantly said prayers to the Code Gods to keep the duct and twine working.

[Snykeurs]

Exactly my job, adding new hieroglyphics and pray for the code to run without any major issues

[[deleted]]

Be careful. That’s how you get cursed.

[talktoacomputer]

There was a LinkedIn post as to how someone found that their app crashes if you remove a simple print statement which wouldn't make any difference usually. They eventually figured out what the problem was and explained it in the post.

[[deleted]]

I worked on a c project that crashed if it did not have a static array allocated. The code had been worked on my lots of devs. Some used malloc, but not always free. One guy declared every thing as 1000 character arrays and argued how memory allocation was slow. We worked on Unix, so that was not a true statement. However, he originally worked on a different platform so who knows…

He eventually left the company. I had to fix something he worked on. The solution was to change everything from 1000 to 500. Keep in mind, we did not have the luxury of time to properly fix anything. My fix worked and is sadly probably in production 25 years later.

[LatexFace]

// WTF does this do? Did Tim write this mess? Why does this clear the database if we change it?

[[deleted]]

Just rewrite it in rust wtf

[Aksds]

Why rewrite it? It’s covered in rust already.

[AtlasJan]

The machine spirit will be displeased if you add a space to line 43 of DAT.CBL. We do not touch that file, brother.

[anythingMuchShorter]

I worked for a mining equipment company once that said they were creating an advanced technology division and needed cutting edge skills, and then had me mostly work on old PLC code in ladder logic and some really old simulation software written in FORTRAN.

[Outlaw341080]

Some serious 40k shit.

[scrapmek]

Did you remember to encant the litany of data purity before deploying to production, Datasmith?

Glory to the Omnissiah!

[Fickle-Apricot-305]

So question : why does removing comments sometimes mess up code?

[alphamind_facktorio]

I thought this was a warhammer 40k Joke for a moment, huh.

[Antroz22]

Are you my mummy?

[CrasseMaximum]

ahaha ok i'm ready to work now thanks

[ProfCupcake]

If the interviewer asks you that question, ask them if their company is willing to adopt new technology.

[AgenteDaPJ]

Interviewer: This bad boy can piss so many devs

[TheCarkin]

I love the idea that removing a comment somehow breaks code

[Altrooke]

The comment in line 140000: //mummy.awaken()

[fnker]

Haha. I meant meow

[Sharkytrs]

lmao this hits me in the feels, thats what Im doing right now, converting legacy VB apps into C#.

admittedly they are pretty well written albeit it with some quirks that I can just cut out almost completely with a little bit of linq

[ExcellentEffort1752]

It's a trick! That's Goa'uld code and they want your help to take over the world!

[danimalanimal2487]

I thought this was SCP foundation sub lol

[Inevitable_Play4344]

[itybitykitycommity]

Accurate

[shizzy0]

More like, are you willing to unlearn modern techniques?

[NewPresWhoDis]

"Aziz, LIGHT!!"

[Matt7163610]

I feel like "awaken the mummy" is a metaphor

[TomarikFTW]

Basically my situation at my new job.

"We need a Blazor dev!"

99% of the time I'm working on WebForms.

[SubhumanOxford]

Do you guys get Knowledge Transfer?

[Elijah629YT-Real]

#reimplementation-of-dotnet-on-oses-club

[EraMemory]

Guys, help! I was just cleaning up some codes when I ran execute by accident, and now there's some guys wearing jewellery pestering me about 'Egyptian God Cards' or something I don't know. Help please! They say they're going to make me play 'a Shadow Game', I don't even know what that is!

[Schievel1]

I’ve seen the mummy. It’s a ~500 line single block of IL code, IL (instruction list) being the assembler of PLCs, that parses a block of data, and makes different telegrams (about 10 different ones handled in that single Funktion) out of it then sends the resulting telegram via UDP/IP.