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Ask HN: What is the worst codebase you have ever seen?
- Someone1234 11y agoA mainframe application written in COBOL, running in some kind of Java-based emulator, running in Tomcat, presented over the web. When browsing to it you were literally presented with a terminal and had to enter insanely obscure commands (all single letter or two letter if they got fancy e.g. A L 1 (applications, list, select option #1 which you knew happen to be stock), X (exit/terminate), J L (jobs, list), J L 1 X (jobs, list, option #1, terminate), etc). Oh and nobody knows how the COBOL code works because there is almost no documentation, nobody who wrote it still works there (or is alive?), and they cannot hire a COBOL programmer. This is still used by a multi-national for all of their ordering/inventory/stock/etc. Instead of updating it or replacing it, they're just built a bunch of cruft around it which convert the outputted formats into whatever they need (e.g. binary format into CSV, CSV to binary). I won't name the company, but you'll find their products in the entertainment section at all major retailers.