|
Still... a well written COBOL program is elegant AND I can open any damn pickle jar I encounter.
|
|
|
|
|
A project I inherited had a 1200-line function, duplicated 7 times, each with slightly different input parameters and doing something slightly different. Very subtle differences, which were easy to miss.
I spent weeks trying to refactor it and deduplicate as much code as I could. I think in the end I had a single function, 700 lines long, that took in a few more input params than the 7 original functions, and branched off on those as appropriate in the code. I was still not satisfied with it, and frankly I'd still rather not even think about it.
It was written by one of the company founders, who should never have been allowed anywhere near a compiler.
[going on a tangent, you got me started] 
I spent an awful lot of time trying to convince him something he had in mind couldn't be done, unless he intended to have someone dedicated full-time to keeping that code up to date, as the data it needed to gather came from different software companies that didn't talk to each other or standardize on anything and could change on a whim. The data was never intended to be read by third-parties, so they could change format as often as they wanted (and they did).
He wasn't happy with my justification, so he then decided to take it upon himself to "write it in a weekend"...come Monday morning, he had something that worked, which he showed to other people (who didn't know any better) who complimented him on the work and decided to commit to it, and why couldn't I have come up with that since it only took the other guy two days to do it. His code was only compatible with the data produced by one version of the third-party software he was working with. Nothing else. And within a week it was broken because the data format had changed.
|
|
|
|
|
|
I sure like the ending of that story! (The Old New Thing is always worth reading!)
|
|
|
|
|
I don't recall the longest file, but it was definitly many thousands of lines long. The last application I worked on had quite a few of these, even individual functions that long. Ugh. Those functions tried to do everything and I'm sure they cost the company more than they were worth to maintain.
I'm the same as you; around 1000 lines I start to get uncomfortable. 500 is the sweet spot. It gets really annoying to have to use tools to hunt for your spot in the file every single time, rather than just paging there. Good monitors have made a little extra length easier to tolerate, but not that much.
It's generally a bad smell. Some files just get that way because of neglect, which is its own source of problems. If you see this symptom, expect others. Careful, incremental refactoring over a period of years can help, but you still have a job to do, so there are limits.
Good luck with your new codebase. It's a chore, but hopefully you'll find lots of gems, too.
|
|
|
|
|
The biggest file in one of the 20-year developed repository that I have seen before contains 13189 rows and its history begins not a long ago, in 2006 
Only nine files in the repository are longer than 10000 rows, but there are 65 (sixty-five!) files longer than 5000 rows.
Try to live with this without regrets and remorse 
|
|
|
|
|
27928 lines. It's an order form with many tab sheets and sub-tab sheets. Surprisingly, most of the business logic is not in this form. It's mostly UI handling stuff. This does not include the designer file, which is 36270 lines.
Bond
Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
|
|
|
|
|
Here in Brazil sales taxes are Lovecraftian levels of nightmarish. We have a form in a shared Windows Forms library that we use in several of our "of the shelf" products that deals with invoicing and taxes of product sales that is 17K lines in and of itself, no counting helpers and specialized components and dialogs. Most of that code it to manage the interacion between the UI and the rules and calculations for taxes. You sometimes see people complaining about doing income tax declarations, they have no idea how it is like to sell a simple piece of candy in Brazil.
|
|
|
|
|
não é reddit, mas r/suddenlycaralho !
Que vai querer no print, meu bom companheiro Dev BR, sofredor com cálculo de IPI/PIS/COFINS?
|
|
|
|
|
12k lines in Program.cs for a console/batch processing application running at a government authority where I used to work. It was for validating and processing Financial Transactions (MiFID II)
The original developer was on extended maternity leave+vacation (1.5 year). No one wanted to give maintenance to it (neither the original dev, when she came back 8 months after I was hired) because it was too unwieldy to do anything there. I was hired specifically to deal with it. Took around two months to have it on my mind to actually start breaking it down.
Since no one was interested in working on the beast, I kinda grew fond of the project because it was important, and no one bothered/pressured me when I told them that improving things would take time. Also, I was free to perform any needed refactorings to the thing.
I managed to improve its performance by several times first (to remove processing bottlenecks), and then started refactoring it, bit by bit.
It was a pity I had to leave that project behind and go back to my home country. Since I was a contractor, and it was before the pandemic started, so people were not very fond of offering me to work remotely.
|
|
|
|
|
I was tasked with "tidying up" a killer demo hacked up by a data scientist on our team during his holidays.
After looking at the single 15k line Javascript file he produced, I suggested we rewrite the demo frontend from scratch since it was going to be difficult to work on (even though it looked really polished).
That suggestion was shot down as unnecessary engineering, but when I looked closer it became clear that he'd "borrowed" a complete demo published by another company -- a single minified Javascript file -- and swapped out of a few pieces so it called his own prototype backend running on a laptop (that bit at least was entirely his own work).
At that point I suggested this might be a good reason for us to proceed with the frontend rewrite, and that I wouldn't be comfortable putting my name on another company's pilfered and tweaked demo. The DS seemed relieved and immediately agreed. He was a good guy, but probably crumpling under delivery pressure from management, and he never really intended for an internal proof-of-concept to suddenly become a user-facing feature of the site, but by then it was hard to backpedal until I forced the issue.
|
|
|
|
|
Probably not a reasonable answer because this is from back in the mainframe days but I seem to recall the Unisys A-Series operating System MCP (yes we laughed when Tron came out) was a million - ish lines of code. And not assembly code, written in NEWP, an Algol loke language.
|
|
|
|
|
Mircea Neacsu wrote: what's the largest single source file you ever met?
File?
I found a C++ class which spanned 3 source files - at least.
It had 20,000 lines of code and at least 200 attributes and 200 methods.
Years later I read the book "AntiPatterns" in which it described the God Pattern. That is what that class was.
|
|
|
|
|
I wrote an SVG parser today.
I didn't want to.
The one I had already was too "clever" by half.
"I know, I'll just modify the passed in string I'm parsing by inserting null terminators in it and storing pointers to various locations in the string."
Yeah, you think you're slick, but what if that string is coming from a .text segment?
Or what if you have a huge file you don't want to load into a string first?
*headdesk*
If you ever consider doing what that author did, ping me and I'll help you write a *proper* parser.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
|
|
|
|
|
|
I'm pretty clear on the SVG format.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
|
|
|
|
|
Hopefully, you already had a JavaScript implementation you could bolt onto the SVG!
|
|
|
|
|
I tried to organize a professional hide and seek tournament, but it was a complete failure...
Good players are hard to find.
*hides*
|
|
|
|
|
I once took a shot in the dark and tried to organize a laser tag event.
The amateur horseshoe tournament was a fiasco when it was revealed that one of the teams had a ringer.
modified 2-Mar-23 11:08am.
|
|
|
|
|
I tried to set up an Procrastination Society, but ... maybe one day.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
|
|
|
|
|
sign me ....
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
|
|
|
|
|
I am so lazy that I even put off procrastination.
|
|
|
|
|
My SO says I'm trying...very trying!
|
|
|
|
|
I tried holding a water polo event, but the horses drowned.
// TODO: Insert something here Top ten reasons why I'm lazy
1.
|
|
|
|
|
|
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
