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0 pointseinhverfr12y ago0 comments

> Those 100 line functions wouldn't make it through any half decent code review.

True but I have worked on worse. The codebase we inherited from SQL-Ledger is quite a bit worse and was even more poorly commented when we forked (the only comments, aside from two lines describing the module, and copyright notices, were magic comments which if you delete things, stuff breaks).

And some of the modules were 4-5k lines with 1000-line functions. In a codebase of over 100k lines :-P. As we continue to pull out this logic, our codebase increases in functionality and decreases rather significantly in size.

Oh, and it was Perl which relied on sloppy global scoping and so you couldn't test it.

But hey, we are replacing the code at a pretty good clip.

What is really frustrating with the SQL-Ledger codebase (at least as of 2.6 and 2.8, I haven't looked at 3.0) though and is probably the case in the code you are linking to is that the developer had over 10 years of progress in this and still never seemed to manage to improve:

     IS->post_invoice(\%myconfig, \%$form);

Really? That's like pass by reference to dereferenced reference, right?

It's one thing to write crappy software. It's quite another to write it for over a decade and never improve.

0 comments

lugg12y ago

I hate to be all, my pile of spaghetti is bigger than your pile of spaghetti, yet I just can't help myself

- 2 decades in development

- just under 3k "scripts", mixture of php html "fusion", php classes, and last decade or so templates have been added

- last wc -l check, was well into 1m lines in house code

- database (we have a few), >300 tables, it used to be around 4 but we culled some tables / systems

This is our oldest system, still in use, still extremely business critical, we're doing a similar thing to you moving things out, cleaning house so to speak. But its going to be ongoing for a long time to come thats for sure.

Some of the people in this thread should get together and start a new dailywtf clone. Pretty sure we could preload a years worth of content with nothing but grep and git-log.

einhverfrOP12y ago

> - just under 3k "scripts", mixture of php html "fusion", php classes, and last decade or so templates have been added

Unfortunately the fact is once you get to a certain point you pretty much have to accept that you are going to have some inconsistency and rewriting is going to happen gradually. With the LedgerSMB codebase, we have a mixture of code before the fork, which is a mixture of Perl spitting out HTML as strings in pieces and Perl assembling db queries in little pieces, so your comment made me somewhat uncomfortable because it reminded me of what I am going through in the rewrite process.

> - last wc -l check, was well into 1m lines in house code

wc -l was in my case closer to 200k, but once you exclude blanks readmes, documentation and comments we added, it got down to about 100-130k. Not really sure.

However, the code was messed up in ways that are only possible by taking powerful features of a language and systematically abusing them. In the db, needless polymorphic associations which served no purpose.

Almost every module had a name of exactly 2 letters, and the scope of some of the modules was just breathtaking. PE.pm for example handled logical groupings of parts for point of sale, customer discount groups, and project accounting.

Now if there were modules that did too much, there were also modules which were divided for no reason at all. You had, for example, ar/ap workflow and user interface split between aa.pl, arap.pl, and arapprn.pl (the latter being printing support functions).

This is code that every time I work with it, I find unpleasant surprises lurking beneath the surface. It is code that when we forked failed basic tests for things like rounding numbers (financial app). We fixed that right away.

If we are lucky we will be done with the rewrite in another five years.

> Some of the people in this thread should get together and start a new dailywtf clone. Pretty sure we could preload a years worth of content with nothing but grep and git-log.

Definitely. I am up for it. Should I start a blog and post the url here? I would be happy to add you.

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