14 ms·

The Inner Json Effect

291 points by dsego 10y ago

shangxiao 10y ago
This reminds me of a similar horror story involving "the ultimate database design" https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/opinion-pieces/bad-carma/ https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/opinion-pieces/bad-carma...
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  I have a theory that every programmer, at an early stage in their career, comes up with something approximating the 'metadatabase'. The only difference between any of us is how quickly we realise it's an appalling idea. There's a grey area: I've worked with databases on internal systems with key/value tables that just about make sense and were small enough to be manageable. It's when you see this kind of crap in production, third-party products that you want to run a mile.
  - MattBearman 10y ago
    Ha, I did it in my early PHP days! At one stage I even tried using MySQL column comments to store metadata. I think these kinds of things are great learning experiences, I'm just glad that abomination of mine was never released.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    A lot of "enterprise" applications (particularly CRMs) do have everything in the database - including their own metadata and executable code (scripts and/or binaries). Sometimes this works a lot better that you might expect and the platform works pretty well, sometimes it produces Cthulhu level nightmares.
    - davidgerard 10y ago
      Magento is a pretty good example, as I describe here (and oh my goodness the horrors in DCoder's followup comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12152874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12152874
  - chriswarbo 10y ago
    Sounds like the "inner-platform effect", which this article's title seems to be a reference to. That's where a system is so soft-coded that its configuration ends up being a (poor) clone of the original programming language. That could be using a key/value table in a relational database, and using custom data and code to reimplement tables/columns/joins/etc. In the case of JDSL, it's using Javascript code and JSON metadata to implement Javascript code. There's also the "second system effect", where the creator tries to avoid all of the bad things they encountered in the first system, and implement every spur-of-the-moment idea they ever had, all at once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
    - Kristine1975 10y ago
      >which this article's title seems to be a reference to The first mention of JDSL is a link to an article about it: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect
  - morgante 10y ago
    It's extraordinary how often I have to point out that what someone is proposing is either called a "database" (to people who think it's a good idea to build a complicated file system complete with various metadata files) or a "programming language" (to the people who think it would be helpful to have some language which can logically encode business rules in a computationally understandable manner).
    - kbenson 10y ago
      The interesting thing is that it goes both ways. Sometimes, when someone wants to store blobs of data in the database, you need to explain to them that it's probably better to use the file system in some manner. The common refrain is "no, we want to use the database", to which the answer often is "the file system is a database, just one that's already been optimized for what you are trying to do". Similarly, sometimes it's useful to provide just enough primitives that a "non-programmer" can be trained on how to perform a very constrained set of operations on the data they deal with, and provide them with a simplistic language that funnels them into the types of operations they are most likely to want and away from (or disallowing) operations that are deemed problematic or complex. The issue is that these options are usually not what you want to do. Not because they are wrong, but because they are much more likely to result in something worse, given the possible outcomes. Usually, the result is multiple of the following: too late, too slow, too complex, too inefficient, too hard to maintain, too hard to develop. That said, given a fairly lax timetable, smart people to design and develop the system with, and a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished, great things can be accomplished. But how often to do we get all that at once?
- martimoose 10y ago
  They describe something akin to Wordpress' custom fields
  - etatoby 10y ago
    That's because custom fields in WordPress, as well as in Liferay and in a bunch of other products, are implemented as EAV, Entity–attribute–value model, which is an abomination. It is a relational "design pattern" used to implement a database inside a database, instead of using the database itself as it was designed to be used. This has all sorts of fun (not) and useful (neither) effects, including: worsened performance; inability to ensure data integrity through constraints; bloated / unreadable queries; hard to find bugs; needlessly complicated migrations; and so on.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      The alternative to EAV for custom fields is allowing users to modify the database schema. I'd rather stick with EAV.
      - deno 10y ago
        What’s wrong with just namespacing tables per module/app/whatever? `wordpress_%app_table1` etc. if you want to do it ad-hoc. PostgresSQL support namespacing out of the box[1][2]. [1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/ddl-schemas.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/ddl-schemas.html [2] http://jerodsanto.net/2011/07/building-multi-tenant-rails-apps-with-postgresql-schemas/ http://jerodsanto.net/2011/07/building-multi-tenant-rails-ap...
        jameshart 10y ago
        Because giving a webapp sufficient permissions to CREATE, ALTER, and DROP tables is risky.
        emodendroket 10y ago
        It gets harder to make assumptions about what tables are there when you want to migrate things. I also think it's a hassle if you want to do something like have multiple tenants in a single DB (not impossible, I suppose).
- pdpi 10y ago
  Some of these crazy designs make it into major applications. E.g. SAP stores all code in the database. http://www.se80.co.uk/saptables/r/repo/reposrc.htm http://www.se80.co.uk/saptables/r/repo/reposrc.htm
  - clifanatic 10y ago
    Salesforce works that way, too.
  - fanf2 10y ago
    And Peoplesoft.
- zeveb 10y ago
  Wow — I've submitted it under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12187520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12187520 because I think it merits its own discussion.
- kamaal 10y ago
  This is a common everyday story with NoSQL databases these days. One document/table format with 100's of fields like col1, col2, col3... so that they can stuff in whatever they want without having to think through schema design. If you try to confront it, they label you as outdated programmer from the 90's. NoSQL sort of legitimized these kind of bad practices. I've seen those sort of things all over the place in every NoSQL project I've ever worked on.
petetnt 10y ago
The scary part here is that I am not actually sure whether this is fiction or not.
- junke 10y ago
  > Founded in 2004 by Alex Papadimoulis, The Daily WTF is your how-not-to guide for developing software. We recount tales of disastrous development, from project management gone spectacularly bad to inexplicable coding choices. Remy Porter is the editor-in-chief and needs to read your story or see your bad code. And below: > Submit Your WTF Stories are not supposed to be fiction. Granted, editors can't check how true what you submit is (and often, you only have one side of the story), but there seems to be so much available material out there that we don't need fictional entries.
  - douche 10y ago
    At one point, I believe they released a Visual Studio extension that would let you highlight a particularly WTF-worthy chunk of code and post it up easily. I was tempted with some of the code that I inherited after it had gone through a couple iterations of cut-rate outsourced freelancers...
- Jean-Philipe 10y ago
  Same here. The other stories do seem real though. A friend of mine once worked at a software company as recently as 2014 (it went bankrupt meanwhile) where the team of around 10 developers would work without any versioning system at all! They used folders with dates instead, and every once in a while someone would go over all the folders with the respective developer and merge the code manually. My friend tried to introduce SVN, but the developers didn't want to invest time into learning it. Anyway, given the stories I know first-hand, I totally believe it's a true story!
  - baybal2 10y ago
    In Russia, we had people running in between desks with stacks of floppy disks and flash drives up until mid 200\
NhanH 10y ago
Is that true story?
grosbisou 10y ago
This is hilarious but I don't take this as a satire. In my modest experience most companies have something like this going on. Either the guy that everybody think is a genius because he wrote a custom (shitty) framework or just the horrible process and code base. And remember, when you interview for companies that ask you questions about the latest javascript trends, how you would design a nice one page application, how internal Go works, etc. They most likely work with spaghetti jquery everywhere and a homemade php framework as bad as in this post.
- kbenson 10y ago
  See, I think the real mark of a genius is being able to make connections and see possibilities that are harder for normal people, and make something obvious and simple. You don't have to be a genius to code yourself into a corner. We've all done that before. Most of us weren't so full of ourselves that we couldn't eventually recognize our mistake though.
- donatj 10y ago
  Lol, I'm genuinely trying to figure out if you interviewed at my company.
- _pmf_ 10y ago
  Meta-programming is a slippery slope. If you have a Clojure macro that pulls stuff from a DB, you're already halfway in Funky Town.
- mark-r 10y ago
  You can tell they're a genius when only a genius could have concocted something so complicated and convoluted and still make it work. I seriously don't doubt that Tom had an off the chart IQ, but intelligence doesn't automatically lead to sensibleness. I get to work on genius code all day long.
  - nameless912 10y ago
    The dumb programmer is the most efficient one.
ahoka 10y ago
Why is there always a "genius" behind stuff like this?
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  When you don't understand something it's impossible to tell whether the creator was a genius or an imbecile. This is probably why hiring a sole programmer in a start-up is such a nightmare. And I speak as one who is that sole programmer.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    It's also something that can accidentally happen as a cargo cult when you don't quite realize you hired a single very senior programmer and lots of very junior programmers without much of a middle ground or experience spectrum. That's a relatively easy trap for a company to fall into, especially early on, because it can be cheaper and easier to hire more junior programmers faster (ie, grads right out of college) rather than try to structure around a less steep gradient.
- cstuder 10y ago
  Replace "genius" with "senior engineer" and you might understand how this sort of things happen a little bit better.
- s_kilk 10y ago
  It's usually a combination of a competent but misguided senior engineer and a fleet of buisiness dudes who aren't qualified to assess whether the engineers work is actually any good. He'll seem to weave magic initially, and the company/project will launch and make money for the people involved. It's only later, when other engineers show up, that the extent of the horror becomes evident, by which point the senior engineer has already been enshrined as the "genius" behind the companies success. Only the new, junior engineers can see the Emperors clothes for what they are.
  - jerf 10y ago
    "It's usually a combination of a competent but misguided senior engineer" Quibble: Anyone who comes up with and deploys that sort of system is not competent. They may be "senior", chronologically anyhow, but they are not "competent". Compenent senior engineers know about the inner-platform effect. Similarly, to me making avoid a second reply, it's not just lack of communication that makes this system bad. The inner-platform antipattern is objectively bad, no matter how it is communicated.
gargravarr 10y ago
I read TDWTF as cautionary tales. I find this one to be reasonably (and scarily) believable. This 'Tom' guy probably looked at Subversion and decided, 'hey, history tracking is a GREAT thing, but I want to be able to see the history IN THE FILE ITSELF.' Thus was born JDSL. The closing paragraph puts it perfectly. The design lends itself to production running latest trunk (because, obviously, it's assembled at runtime FROM SVN). The idea that a commit could instantly break production is horrifying. Just another example of a developer looking for a problem to apply his solution to.
ragebol 10y ago
Really hoping this is a joke and fiction. At least I chuckled.
rurban 10y ago
Great example of abstract business logic. Totally believe it's true.
svckr 10y ago
This is stupid. Why would they write JDSL if they could just have used https://github.com/josh/cafe-js https://github.com/josh/cafe-js which is clearly superior because it uses Git instead of SVN? Typical case of NIH. /s Actually, I've read about the content-addressable-function-idea before, but I can't remember where that was…
- marianoguerra 10y ago
  Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of erlang usually talks about this. http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768.html http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768...
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  Maybe from Joe Armstrong? http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5079 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5079
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Why? NIH. Or they hadn't heard of it.
userbinator 10y ago
I saw similar levels of ridiculousness with XML during my (brief) time working with Enterprise Java many years ago, although it didn't go as far as the use of Subversion... but I did experience a lot of the "you just don't understand how beautiful it is" sentiment from the architecture-astronaut creator(s) of these behemoths. Now that JSON is the "new modern XML", I'm not surprised at all that things like this have come into existence.
EnderMB 10y ago
What a silly system! They should have used BobX instead. http://thedailywtf.com/articles/We-Use-BobX http://thedailywtf.com/articles/We-Use-BobX
- scrame 10y ago
  hmm. actually, the looping and conditionals in bobx look a bit like jstl.
fndrplayer13 10y ago
Enjoyable read, and I think for any experienced developer there's at least a _bit_ to relate to in there. But seriously, this is why you have an integ/staging environment :) And obviously, better developers.
rollulus 10y ago
Before I started my professional career I used to believe that the stories on the daily wtf were fiction.
- clifanatic 10y ago
  The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.
anton_gogolev 10y ago
Reading these kinds of stories, I can't help but reflect on how many days of my life spent dealing with crap similar to this I'm never getting back. Hair stands on the back of my neck, literally.
mtrn 10y ago
So many things can go wrong. But how do you assess, where to draw a line? What could be used as a guiding light? Currently I try to use the following scenario as orientation: If a completely new developer would walk in and wanted to install or build or contribute to a current system/project, how much I would have to explain to this person? How many, "yes, true, but only if" style statements would I need to make? The optimum here is, that a developer will contribute, without me needing to explain or motivate anything. Do you use a certain approach? How would you describe it?
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  Other things that I find useful to consider: How big of an IDE and how many extensions/plugins to that IDE do I need to require? Recommend? Can you take a fresh code clone and hit the big green play button in your IDE and go straight into debugging? How long does it take to build that first time from a fresh start? Subsequent "average" attempts?
- sly010 10y ago
  Is this really that much different from any other industry though? The system in the story is clearly insane, but every organization (not just software companies) has it's own operational awkwardness, that might look weird for new employees. Imagine that Google has all their code in a single repository. How "insane" is that? My point is I don't see why is it a hard requirement for a new developer to be able to commit code on day 1. Of course if you have hundreds of developers, it makes sense to optimize the process, but personally I would prefer a new college to walk me through things (apprenticeship style) rather than throw me at a repo and go-figure-it-out.
- morgante 10y ago
  If a competent senior developer can't come in and make a commit (even a simple one) on their first day, your system is too complicated and should be rethought.
Kristine1975 10y ago
JDSL sounds like a capital idea, but obviously Subversion is much too slow, and Javascript/JSON is not enterprise-compatible. Someone should re-implement it using EJB's, XML and an Oracle backend to store the functions in. P.S: Dear Eris, please let me never turn into Tom!
- maze-le 10y ago
  I honestly fear the day my boss stumbles over this idea.
  - nameless912 10y ago
    This is like the programming version of sarcastaball. We'll make up the stupidest possible idea, and then our bosses will find out and think they're brilliant.
haddr 10y ago
Even if I have never had this sort of Content Addressable Function "solution" I can still relate very much to this story. A story consisting of $NEW_PERSON entering some huge existing project, with $NULL_AMOUNT of documentation, where there is some established "hegemony" of some inaccessible $GENIUS, with $ZERO_AMOUNT of help and support, where bosses will likely to $YELL or otherwise treat you as a problem, where every move is very fragile and often leads to $CONFLICT... I surprises me how archetypical is this. It is this moment when you search for the big red lever with sign: "EJECT!!!"
- RobertKerans 10y ago
  This is literally what I'm doing atm, on my first non-basic-bigfixing issue at a new company. Something that should have take two days has taken three, going on four weeks, I feel like a shitbag fraud for not polishing it off in two days (due to.pain time refactoring and seperating concerns). Noone can give me advice because <particular deity> left the company, and anyway they're rebuilding everything in <internal JS framework with no external deps>, but this critical feature needs to be done in place. Been in this situation before as well, thought I'd managed to escape...
pmontra 10y ago
Jake should have left two weeks earlier. That JDSL was a disaster waiting to happen. Jake was lucky it happened quickly and he didn't waste his career on that system.
anonymousguy 10y ago
The primary problems in that article are nothing to do with technology. Consider these statements: * "Tom is a genius", which implies the Tom solution is a trusted asset beyond improvement, doubt, or questioning. It also implies the solutions provided by Tom are golden unimproveable truths. * The various statements from Scott suggest an indisputable faith in process and convention. Clearly there are failures at multiple levels here. First of all Tom sounds like a whiny bitch. These personality types are inherently defensive and typically seek to reinforce an individual's position of self triumph in a small pond. Toxic. Secondly, Scott has a lot of faith in process and conventions. Processes and conventions are the absolute enemy of creativity. I understand processes are necessary to establish a certain level of security, but they more typically exist to satisfy some OCD insanity where there is comfort in doing things in a particular way without consideration for why they are done in that way. Many developers cannot tell the different between security and superficial stupidity. Many technology abstractions enable that stupidity thereby convolute the differences between security and OCD stupid which only enables additional stupidity. All of the prior mentioned failures are allowed to exist because the management doesn't want to be involved until there is a problem, such as Tom crying. This is called enabling. Most important of all is that all technology should be questioned, doubted, and challenged. Obviously this sort of continuous improvement is utterly absent, because everybody has a competing agenda.
- zer0gravity 10y ago
  When engineers start acting like religious people it's time to run...
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    True, though this story sounded more like one engineer convinced of his godhood and a bunch of clueless managers who ensure that the only way you can keep your job is to believe in the greatness of the solution and its author...
  - tomcam 10y ago
    Please replace the term "religious people" with "people of color" and understand the harm you are doing in your discourse. It is blatant prejudice.
zer0gravity 10y ago
It may seem appealing to go down the meta meta programming rabbit hole, but let's not forget, that any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complicated, it takes a stroke of genius to move in the OPPOSITE direction. In engineering things need to be functionally beautiful first.
marsrover 10y ago
"What the fuck" was the first thing I thought after finishing this article. Didn't even realize it was from "thedailywtf.com", but it sure fits there. Good article, hope it's fake.
- clifanatic 10y ago
  I sincerely doubt it was fake.
  - whatever_dude 10y ago
    It's one of those stories that might be fake but still ring true. I know I've been there, on both sides (to some degree), so I can relate.
Waterluvian 10y ago
This is a work of fiction right? I feel so stupid for having to ask.
- damptowel 10y ago
  I wish these kinds of things didn't happen in the real world, but they do. Management wants it fast and cheap, wether it's good, they have no clue, they probably don't trust their engineers who speak too much gobbledigook. So they hire the cheapest sob they can find, if he screws up, the next scrub can take his place, and that one might in turn get fired if the first one made too big of a mess to refactor ("What do you mean, you fixed this bug and now there are TEN MORE? We're already over budget and you were supposed to have finished last week. And don't give me your technobabble excuses!"). Happens more often in places ran by wannabe get-rich-quick type entrepreneurs.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  The first rule is: in tech, all shitthatdidnthappen.txt stories actually did happen. I once got a CD cup holder when I was working dialup tech support.
clifanatic 10y ago
_And_ that short employment stint is a black-mark on Jake's resume. What an industry we have.
- phkahler 10y ago
  >> _And_ that short employment stint is a black-mark on Jake's resume. What an industry we have. But now he can just point people to that WTF piece and say "that's what that was". Anyone who still considers it a black mark after that isn't worth working for. I have a 5-month stint at a huge company on my resume - one that a lot of people would really like to work for. It comes up sometimes in interviews, but I've got a good story behind it and usually come off as capable and ambitious after explaining it. If something raises a question, ask it. Don't just assume the worst of a candidate.
  - chadgeidel 10y ago
    I agree. If a company isn't willing to give me the benefit of the doubt by asking, then maybe it's another place I'm not interested in working.
- mcphage 10y ago
  Why would Jake even list it on his resume? He was there two weeks, it's not worth it.
WDCDev 10y ago
Run for the hills any time anyone says, "It's our in-house developed DSL!". It's a virtual guarantee that whatever was cooked up is some sort of insanity like JDSL.
- pjc50 10y ago
  So how does one avoid this trap? I've occasionally thought of using a DSL for some business logic, presumably the best way is to at least use an existing language (like Tcl) and provide business-specific verbs in it?
  - WDCDev 10y ago
    Don't build a DSL for a production system, period. Production quality DSLs are for academics and/or staff engineers that have enough time and resources to build and maintain them. I don't know about you, but I have a constant backlog of features with tons of interesting problems to solve. There are places where I could build a DSL, but I am not going to because I would inevitably build something hacky and brittle that is impossible to understand and maintain (like JDSL). I can't build new features, and increase the value of the system if my DSL is constantly breaking the system. So don't do it. There is plenty of functionality on the .NET and Ruby platforms for me to model the concepts and objects in the domain without the need for a DSL.
    - amyjess 10y ago
      Oh, this reminds me. I once worked for a company that used RDF for all configuration and scripting for one of its main applications. Instead of using one of the standard methods of encoding RDF (turtle, XML, etc.) our main architect wrote his own. Specifically, he wrote an encoding based on Google Sheets. The triples were the row header, the column header, and the cell value. There were two special tables; one containing namespace aliases and one containing an index of all the tables in the spreadsheet. To deploy, you published a Google Sheet to the web, copied the sheet key, and pasted it into a variable in the Java code's main() function (and we had a few different main classes for a few different deployment types). Later on, he added support for encoding RDF in XLSX spreadsheets so we don't need an Internet connection to launch the app. Let's just say that architect and I didn't get along (and he didn't get along with a good chunk of the devs either; multiple people I worked very well with quit during my time at that company largely because they couldn't get along with him). If you want to see it, the code is open-source (some of their content is proprietary, but there's an open-source RDF store in the public repos that has the proprietary stuff removed and replaced with demo content). It forms part of the appdapter project on Assembla [0] (but only part of it; there's other random stuff in appdapter too), and there are some sample main() functions in the friendularity project on Asssembla [1] (friendularity was our repository of open-source main classes; they mostly just import stuff from other open-source projects and wrap it in a main()). Honestly, though, I didn't touch the appdapter part of the codebase when I worked there, and it's been a couple of years since I've worked there, so I don't think I can help much with running it. I think org.friendularity.bundle.demo.ccmio (or maybe org.friendularity.bundle.launcher.oglweb) is the relevant main project, but I don't remember too well, and I think some things have been refactored since we left. [0] https://app.assembla.com/spaces/appdapter/subversion/source https://app.assembla.com/spaces/appdapter/subversion/source [1] https://app.assembla.com/spaces/friendularity/subversion/source https://app.assembla.com/spaces/friendularity/subversion/sou...
diyseguy 10y ago
This story is like a parable that condenses all my work experiences so far. The problem is that management is easily terrified and impressed by anyone who can flummox them with tech buzzwords and knows just enough programming to be dangerous. They get in early, create a horrific mess that takes other people at least a year to untangle enough to be able to maintain. The company talks forever about rewriting it - but everyone's too busy putting out fires in the spaghetti to work on the newer better architecture. Really, most of the crap these 'geniuses' write could be quickly replaced with something off the open source shelf. But the customers are too entrenched in the proprietary spaghetti, so they can't, etc. And every new 6 figure tech guy they hire just tries to create his own cozy nest of over complex code in a sad attempt to create job security. Its all a scam.
mrsheen 10y ago
What's the name of the company? Their customers deserve to know that story.
firephreek 10y ago
This isn't real right? It's just a made up story to scare, right??
overgard 10y ago
Sometimes I think the industry's obsession with "code reuse" is what enables these architecture astronauts in the first place. If people accepted that most code is ephemeral and never going to be reused, then architecture astronauts have much less idealogical cover for their disastrous schemes. Pretty much the only example of code reuse gone well is open-source libraries; and that's because being public forces the code to be documented and free of implicit dependencies. You pretty much never get that with janky internal frameworks and libraries, and they're usually "reusable" and yet replaced next project.
- nameless912 10y ago
  Right? I mean, special snowflake libraries that everyone can use do exist, don't get me wrong, but they're usually created by people whose sole job it was to create exactly that, a reusable API for <insert domain here>. There's very rarely an opportunity to repurpose old code in a new project if the goal of "API-izing" it wasn't in mind when it was written, and many times when people try it's a disaster. If code could be re-used efficiently, we wouldn't need half as many programmers as we actually legitimately do.
- dexwiz 10y ago
  This a thousand times.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jpalomaki 10y ago
Think about all those dependency management systems (npm, Maven, NuGet). Look at a project with huge number of dependencies, picking on piece of functionality from one library, something else from another. All tied together with some depedencies file and maybe with some additional dependency injection magic. Not backed up by version control, but instead the package repository. Not that many projects add a real DSL, but I think you can end up pretty close also with just objects and language features. And where do you then run this system? Of course in Docker container, probably picking up Linux components with apt-get from left and right.
- AgentME 10y ago
  The bad things in the article were the inner-platform effect and that the inner-platform was especially terrible (no comment support, tons of boilerplate, abuse of the project's own source control, lack of dev/production split). I really don't think the concept of versioned dependencies was one of the bad parts.
- emsy 10y ago
  Sure dependencies can become absurd (like the NPM left-pad story). But should we on the other hand always code everything from scratch? Where does it end?
new_hackers 10y ago
Did anyone else notice the part about checking into the trunk? I agree that the framework and people were definitely WTF. However, I would at least have talked to someone before committing to the trunk, even if I thought I was just adding comments.
pjungwir 10y ago
I think the more interesting question is: when can something crazy like this work? I started writing a comment about that here, but it got long enough I turned it into its own blog post. Here is my submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12188087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12188087
mywittyname 10y ago
This reminds me how I always seem to fall into the "find and program to the pattern" anti-pattern. I am Tom.
outworlder 10y ago
This story could be fiction, but I don't think so. For starters, it takes some serious imagination to come up with a system so broken. And I have seen a system, written in a javascript dialect, execute by an in-house javascript engine written in Delphi, that you had to use the in-house IDE because it was the only way one could find the desired functions. You see, the 'module' system worked by referencing database IDs, from a database table that contained the javascript "file" you wanted to import...
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
I would kick Tom in the jingle berries... so hard ... that every time he ever came up with a crazy idea like this he would ache.
Furincer 10y ago
Satire aside, couldn't they just revert the commits? That is the whole point of the system. ONLY if the system didn't work would Tom be angry, but IF the system didn't work then the rest of the story is contradictory.
- winstonewert 10y ago
  reverting the commits won't bring back the deleted database
  - iraphael 10y ago
    which brings up the other problem of why aren't there backups
nojvek 10y ago
Didn't they have code reviews ?
paloaltokid 10y ago
My WTF entry: I worked at a company whose main website was written in J2EE. This was here in the Bay Area, right in downtown SF. When I joined, I soon learned about "Stephen". Stephen had already left the company but he was still very much a presence. Most of his comments contained expletives, even for something simple like changing a log level: "tell Tomcat to shut the fuck up!" Throughout the wiki, there were references to technical "discussions" around coding standards that often had statements like "Stephen doesn't like this!", which was short for "I don't want to get yelled at so we'll do what Stephen says". There were a lot of things Stephen didn't like. He didn't like Java. He didn't like private methods. He seemed on the fence about getters and setters. But he loved Python. Boy howdy did he love Python. Stephen loved Python so much that much of the Java codebase was uneditable. Yes, uneditable. You see, in order to write the Java code that'd be actually, you know, run in production, you didn't simply open IDEA and write Java. You wrote Python code that emitted Java. Hibernate configs, classes, the lot. Development time wasn't the fastest. Something else Stephen hated was MySQL. He hated it a lot. Postgres was way better in his opinion. Stephen hated MySQL so much that he stripped it out of all the Puppet files one day because he didn't think the company should be running it. Nevermind that he was editing the production files for another team, so the next time Puppet ran, the predictable outcome occurred. I believe that was one of the few times his actions had any direct consequences for him. Beyond Stephen and his hatred of all things non-Python and MySQL, the deployment process was a true thing of horrifying beauty. You see, one didn't simply just drop a WAR file into Tomcat and restart the server process. That'd be much too simple. When you deployed, you deployed everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Apache? Compiled from source and re-installed. Java? Compiled from source and re-installed. Name a dependency other than Postgres and that ish was compiled from source and re-installed. Deploying any code change was a minimum 45-minute process. Heaven help you if a bug was found. (Oh yeah, and of course Stephen's domain user couldn't be removed from Perforce or any of the build systems because all the scripts ran as his user. Nobody knew what might happen if his user was removed. To this day the company still exists after an acquisition and I'd bet good money that Stephen's user is still out there consuming CPU cycles.) My takeaway from this experience is that this kind of environment is pretty common, and it's because of some basic psychology in people. Engineers don't want to look stupid and their social skills are often not developed. So when you meet someone with a strong personality who uses shouting to establish technical superiority, they can get a long way.
MWil 10y ago
Is there any easy way to recreate that blocked visualization of the JSON?
WhiteNoiz3 10y ago
I've come to believe that 'clever' solutions are almost always a bad idea. You should err on the side of best practices. Defying expected norms means that other people aren't going to be able understand your code or maintain it. This is a pretty spectacularly bad example of that. I've actually worked on sites that did similar stuff to this - having multiple versions of the code checked out on the same server with references to files in specific commits.

291 points by dsego 10y ago

This reminds me of a similar horror story involving "the ultimate database design" https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/opinion-pieces/bad-carma/ https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/opinion-pieces/bad-carma...

oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
I have a theory that every programmer, at an early stage in their career, comes up with something approximating the 'metadatabase'. The only difference between any of us is how quickly we realise it's an appalling idea. There's a grey area: I've worked with databases on internal systems with key/value tables that just about make sense and were small enough to be manageable. It's when you see this kind of crap in production, third-party products that you want to run a mile.
- MattBearman 10y ago
  Ha, I did it in my early PHP days! At one stage I even tried using MySQL column comments to store metadata. I think these kinds of things are great learning experiences, I'm just glad that abomination of mine was never released.
- arethuza 10y ago
  A lot of "enterprise" applications (particularly CRMs) do have everything in the database - including their own metadata and executable code (scripts and/or binaries). Sometimes this works a lot better that you might expect and the platform works pretty well, sometimes it produces Cthulhu level nightmares.
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    Magento is a pretty good example, as I describe here (and oh my goodness the horrors in DCoder's followup comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12152874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12152874
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  Sounds like the "inner-platform effect", which this article's title seems to be a reference to. That's where a system is so soft-coded that its configuration ends up being a (poor) clone of the original programming language. That could be using a key/value table in a relational database, and using custom data and code to reimplement tables/columns/joins/etc. In the case of JDSL, it's using Javascript code and JSON metadata to implement Javascript code. There's also the "second system effect", where the creator tries to avoid all of the bad things they encountered in the first system, and implement every spur-of-the-moment idea they ever had, all at once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
  - Kristine1975 10y ago
    >which this article's title seems to be a reference to The first mention of JDSL is a link to an article about it: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect
- morgante 10y ago
  It's extraordinary how often I have to point out that what someone is proposing is either called a "database" (to people who think it's a good idea to build a complicated file system complete with various metadata files) or a "programming language" (to the people who think it would be helpful to have some language which can logically encode business rules in a computationally understandable manner).
  - kbenson 10y ago
    The interesting thing is that it goes both ways. Sometimes, when someone wants to store blobs of data in the database, you need to explain to them that it's probably better to use the file system in some manner. The common refrain is "no, we want to use the database", to which the answer often is "the file system is a database, just one that's already been optimized for what you are trying to do". Similarly, sometimes it's useful to provide just enough primitives that a "non-programmer" can be trained on how to perform a very constrained set of operations on the data they deal with, and provide them with a simplistic language that funnels them into the types of operations they are most likely to want and away from (or disallowing) operations that are deemed problematic or complex. The issue is that these options are usually not what you want to do. Not because they are wrong, but because they are much more likely to result in something worse, given the possible outcomes. Usually, the result is multiple of the following: too late, too slow, too complex, too inefficient, too hard to maintain, too hard to develop. That said, given a fairly lax timetable, smart people to design and develop the system with, and a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished, great things can be accomplished. But how often to do we get all that at once?
martimoose 10y ago
They describe something akin to Wordpress' custom fields
- etatoby 10y ago
  That's because custom fields in WordPress, as well as in Liferay and in a bunch of other products, are implemented as EAV, Entity–attribute–value model, which is an abomination. It is a relational "design pattern" used to implement a database inside a database, instead of using the database itself as it was designed to be used. This has all sorts of fun (not) and useful (neither) effects, including: worsened performance; inability to ensure data integrity through constraints; bloated / unreadable queries; hard to find bugs; needlessly complicated migrations; and so on.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    The alternative to EAV for custom fields is allowing users to modify the database schema. I'd rather stick with EAV.
    - deno 10y ago
      What’s wrong with just namespacing tables per module/app/whatever? `wordpress_%app_table1` etc. if you want to do it ad-hoc. PostgresSQL support namespacing out of the box[1][2]. [1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/ddl-schemas.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/ddl-schemas.html [2] http://jerodsanto.net/2011/07/building-multi-tenant-rails-apps-with-postgresql-schemas/ http://jerodsanto.net/2011/07/building-multi-tenant-rails-ap...
      - jameshart 10y ago
        Because giving a webapp sufficient permissions to CREATE, ALTER, and DROP tables is risky.
      - emodendroket 10y ago
        It gets harder to make assumptions about what tables are there when you want to migrate things. I also think it's a hassle if you want to do something like have multiple tenants in a single DB (not impossible, I suppose).
pdpi 10y ago
Some of these crazy designs make it into major applications. E.g. SAP stores all code in the database. http://www.se80.co.uk/saptables/r/repo/reposrc.htm http://www.se80.co.uk/saptables/r/repo/reposrc.htm
- clifanatic 10y ago
  Salesforce works that way, too.
- fanf2 10y ago
  And Peoplesoft.
zeveb 10y ago
Wow — I've submitted it under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12187520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12187520 because I think it merits its own discussion.
kamaal 10y ago
This is a common everyday story with NoSQL databases these days. One document/table format with 100's of fields like col1, col2, col3... so that they can stuff in whatever they want without having to think through schema design. If you try to confront it, they label you as outdated programmer from the 90's. NoSQL sort of legitimized these kind of bad practices. I've seen those sort of things all over the place in every NoSQL project I've ever worked on.

petetnt 10y ago

The scary part here is that I am not actually sure whether this is fiction or not.

junke 10y ago
> Founded in 2004 by Alex Papadimoulis, The Daily WTF is your how-not-to guide for developing software. We recount tales of disastrous development, from project management gone spectacularly bad to inexplicable coding choices. Remy Porter is the editor-in-chief and needs to read your story or see your bad code. And below: > Submit Your WTF Stories are not supposed to be fiction. Granted, editors can't check how true what you submit is (and often, you only have one side of the story), but there seems to be so much available material out there that we don't need fictional entries.
- douche 10y ago
  At one point, I believe they released a Visual Studio extension that would let you highlight a particularly WTF-worthy chunk of code and post it up easily. I was tempted with some of the code that I inherited after it had gone through a couple iterations of cut-rate outsourced freelancers...
Jean-Philipe 10y ago
Same here. The other stories do seem real though. A friend of mine once worked at a software company as recently as 2014 (it went bankrupt meanwhile) where the team of around 10 developers would work without any versioning system at all! They used folders with dates instead, and every once in a while someone would go over all the folders with the respective developer and merge the code manually. My friend tried to introduce SVN, but the developers didn't want to invest time into learning it. Anyway, given the stories I know first-hand, I totally believe it's a true story!
- baybal2 10y ago
  In Russia, we had people running in between desks with stacks of floppy disks and flash drives up until mid 200\

NhanH 10y ago

Is that true story?

grosbisou 10y ago

This is hilarious but I don't take this as a satire. In my modest experience most companies have something like this going on. Either the guy that everybody think is a genius because he wrote a custom (shitty) framework or just the horrible process and code base. And remember, when you interview for companies that ask you questions about the latest javascript trends, how you would design a nice one page application, how internal Go works, etc. They most likely work with spaghetti jquery everywhere and a homemade php framework as bad as in this post.

kbenson 10y ago
See, I think the real mark of a genius is being able to make connections and see possibilities that are harder for normal people, and make something obvious and simple. You don't have to be a genius to code yourself into a corner. We've all done that before. Most of us weren't so full of ourselves that we couldn't eventually recognize our mistake though.
donatj 10y ago
Lol, I'm genuinely trying to figure out if you interviewed at my company.
_pmf_ 10y ago
Meta-programming is a slippery slope. If you have a Clojure macro that pulls stuff from a DB, you're already halfway in Funky Town.
mark-r 10y ago
You can tell they're a genius when only a genius could have concocted something so complicated and convoluted and still make it work. I seriously don't doubt that Tom had an off the chart IQ, but intelligence doesn't automatically lead to sensibleness. I get to work on genius code all day long.
- nameless912 10y ago
  The dumb programmer is the most efficient one.

ahoka 10y ago

Why is there always a "genius" behind stuff like this?

oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
When you don't understand something it's impossible to tell whether the creator was a genius or an imbecile. This is probably why hiring a sole programmer in a start-up is such a nightmare. And I speak as one who is that sole programmer.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  It's also something that can accidentally happen as a cargo cult when you don't quite realize you hired a single very senior programmer and lots of very junior programmers without much of a middle ground or experience spectrum. That's a relatively easy trap for a company to fall into, especially early on, because it can be cheaper and easier to hire more junior programmers faster (ie, grads right out of college) rather than try to structure around a less steep gradient.
cstuder 10y ago
Replace "genius" with "senior engineer" and you might understand how this sort of things happen a little bit better.
s_kilk 10y ago
It's usually a combination of a competent but misguided senior engineer and a fleet of buisiness dudes who aren't qualified to assess whether the engineers work is actually any good. He'll seem to weave magic initially, and the company/project will launch and make money for the people involved. It's only later, when other engineers show up, that the extent of the horror becomes evident, by which point the senior engineer has already been enshrined as the "genius" behind the companies success. Only the new, junior engineers can see the Emperors clothes for what they are.
- jerf 10y ago
  "It's usually a combination of a competent but misguided senior engineer" Quibble: Anyone who comes up with and deploys that sort of system is not competent. They may be "senior", chronologically anyhow, but they are not "competent". Compenent senior engineers know about the inner-platform effect. Similarly, to me making avoid a second reply, it's not just lack of communication that makes this system bad. The inner-platform antipattern is objectively bad, no matter how it is communicated.

gargravarr 10y ago

I read TDWTF as cautionary tales. I find this one to be reasonably (and scarily) believable. This 'Tom' guy probably looked at Subversion and decided, 'hey, history tracking is a GREAT thing, but I want to be able to see the history IN THE FILE ITSELF.' Thus was born JDSL. The closing paragraph puts it perfectly. The design lends itself to production running latest trunk (because, obviously, it's assembled at runtime FROM SVN). The idea that a commit could instantly break production is horrifying. Just another example of a developer looking for a problem to apply his solution to.

ragebol 10y ago

Really hoping this is a joke and fiction. At least I chuckled.

rurban 10y ago

Great example of abstract business logic. Totally believe it's true.

svckr 10y ago

This is stupid. Why would they write JDSL if they could just have used https://github.com/josh/cafe-js https://github.com/josh/cafe-js which is clearly superior because it uses Git instead of SVN? Typical case of NIH. /s Actually, I've read about the content-addressable-function-idea before, but I can't remember where that was…

marianoguerra 10y ago
Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of erlang usually talks about this. http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768.html http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768...
chriswarbo 10y ago
Maybe from Joe Armstrong? http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5079 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5079
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Why? NIH. Or they hadn't heard of it.

userbinator 10y ago

I saw similar levels of ridiculousness with XML during my (brief) time working with Enterprise Java many years ago, although it didn't go as far as the use of Subversion... but I did experience a lot of the "you just don't understand how beautiful it is" sentiment from the architecture-astronaut creator(s) of these behemoths. Now that JSON is the "new modern XML", I'm not surprised at all that things like this have come into existence.

EnderMB 10y ago

What a silly system! They should have used BobX instead. http://thedailywtf.com/articles/We-Use-BobX http://thedailywtf.com/articles/We-Use-BobX

scrame 10y ago
hmm. actually, the looping and conditionals in bobx look a bit like jstl.

fndrplayer13 10y ago

Enjoyable read, and I think for any experienced developer there's at least a _bit_ to relate to in there. But seriously, this is why you have an integ/staging environment :) And obviously, better developers.

rollulus 10y ago

Before I started my professional career I used to believe that the stories on the daily wtf were fiction.

clifanatic 10y ago
The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.

anton_gogolev 10y ago

Reading these kinds of stories, I can't help but reflect on how many days of my life spent dealing with crap similar to this I'm never getting back. Hair stands on the back of my neck, literally.

mtrn 10y ago

So many things can go wrong. But how do you assess, where to draw a line? What could be used as a guiding light? Currently I try to use the following scenario as orientation: If a completely new developer would walk in and wanted to install or build or contribute to a current system/project, how much I would have to explain to this person? How many, "yes, true, but only if" style statements would I need to make? The optimum here is, that a developer will contribute, without me needing to explain or motivate anything. Do you use a certain approach? How would you describe it?

WorldMaker 10y ago
Other things that I find useful to consider: How big of an IDE and how many extensions/plugins to that IDE do I need to require? Recommend? Can you take a fresh code clone and hit the big green play button in your IDE and go straight into debugging? How long does it take to build that first time from a fresh start? Subsequent "average" attempts?
sly010 10y ago
Is this really that much different from any other industry though? The system in the story is clearly insane, but every organization (not just software companies) has it's own operational awkwardness, that might look weird for new employees. Imagine that Google has all their code in a single repository. How "insane" is that? My point is I don't see why is it a hard requirement for a new developer to be able to commit code on day 1. Of course if you have hundreds of developers, it makes sense to optimize the process, but personally I would prefer a new college to walk me through things (apprenticeship style) rather than throw me at a repo and go-figure-it-out.
morgante 10y ago
If a competent senior developer can't come in and make a commit (even a simple one) on their first day, your system is too complicated and should be rethought.

Kristine1975 10y ago

JDSL sounds like a capital idea, but obviously Subversion is much too slow, and Javascript/JSON is not enterprise-compatible. Someone should re-implement it using EJB's, XML and an Oracle backend to store the functions in. P.S: Dear Eris, please let me never turn into Tom!

maze-le 10y ago
I honestly fear the day my boss stumbles over this idea.
- nameless912 10y ago
  This is like the programming version of sarcastaball. We'll make up the stupidest possible idea, and then our bosses will find out and think they're brilliant.

haddr 10y ago

Even if I have never had this sort of Content Addressable Function "solution" I can still relate very much to this story. A story consisting of $NEW_PERSON entering some huge existing project, with $NULL_AMOUNT of documentation, where there is some established "hegemony" of some inaccessible $GENIUS, with $ZERO_AMOUNT of help and support, where bosses will likely to $YELL or otherwise treat you as a problem, where every move is very fragile and often leads to $CONFLICT... I surprises me how archetypical is this. It is this moment when you search for the big red lever with sign: "EJECT!!!"

RobertKerans 10y ago
This is literally what I'm doing atm, on my first non-basic-bigfixing issue at a new company. Something that should have take two days has taken three, going on four weeks, I feel like a shitbag fraud for not polishing it off in two days (due to.pain time refactoring and seperating concerns). Noone can give me advice because <particular deity> left the company, and anyway they're rebuilding everything in <internal JS framework with no external deps>, but this critical feature needs to be done in place. Been in this situation before as well, thought I'd managed to escape...

pmontra 10y ago

Jake should have left two weeks earlier. That JDSL was a disaster waiting to happen. Jake was lucky it happened quickly and he didn't waste his career on that system.

anonymousguy 10y ago

The primary problems in that article are nothing to do with technology. Consider these statements: * "Tom is a genius", which implies the Tom solution is a trusted asset beyond improvement, doubt, or questioning. It also implies the solutions provided by Tom are golden unimproveable truths. * The various statements from Scott suggest an indisputable faith in process and convention. Clearly there are failures at multiple levels here. First of all Tom sounds like a whiny bitch. These personality types are inherently defensive and typically seek to reinforce an individual's position of self triumph in a small pond. Toxic. Secondly, Scott has a lot of faith in process and conventions. Processes and conventions are the absolute enemy of creativity. I understand processes are necessary to establish a certain level of security, but they more typically exist to satisfy some OCD insanity where there is comfort in doing things in a particular way without consideration for why they are done in that way. Many developers cannot tell the different between security and superficial stupidity. Many technology abstractions enable that stupidity thereby convolute the differences between security and OCD stupid which only enables additional stupidity. All of the prior mentioned failures are allowed to exist because the management doesn't want to be involved until there is a problem, such as Tom crying. This is called enabling. Most important of all is that all technology should be questioned, doubted, and challenged. Obviously this sort of continuous improvement is utterly absent, because everybody has a competing agenda.

zer0gravity 10y ago
When engineers start acting like religious people it's time to run...
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  True, though this story sounded more like one engineer convinced of his godhood and a bunch of clueless managers who ensure that the only way you can keep your job is to believe in the greatness of the solution and its author...
- tomcam 10y ago
  Please replace the term "religious people" with "people of color" and understand the harm you are doing in your discourse. It is blatant prejudice.

zer0gravity 10y ago

It may seem appealing to go down the meta meta programming rabbit hole, but let's not forget, that any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complicated, it takes a stroke of genius to move in the OPPOSITE direction. In engineering things need to be functionally beautiful first.

marsrover 10y ago

"What the fuck" was the first thing I thought after finishing this article. Didn't even realize it was from "thedailywtf.com", but it sure fits there. Good article, hope it's fake.

clifanatic 10y ago
I sincerely doubt it was fake.
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  It's one of those stories that might be fake but still ring true. I know I've been there, on both sides (to some degree), so I can relate.

Waterluvian 10y ago

This is a work of fiction right? I feel so stupid for having to ask.

damptowel 10y ago
I wish these kinds of things didn't happen in the real world, but they do. Management wants it fast and cheap, wether it's good, they have no clue, they probably don't trust their engineers who speak too much gobbledigook. So they hire the cheapest sob they can find, if he screws up, the next scrub can take his place, and that one might in turn get fired if the first one made too big of a mess to refactor ("What do you mean, you fixed this bug and now there are TEN MORE? We're already over budget and you were supposed to have finished last week. And don't give me your technobabble excuses!"). Happens more often in places ran by wannabe get-rich-quick type entrepreneurs.
davidgerard 10y ago
The first rule is: in tech, all shitthatdidnthappen.txt stories actually did happen. I once got a CD cup holder when I was working dialup tech support.

clifanatic 10y ago

_And_ that short employment stint is a black-mark on Jake's resume. What an industry we have.

phkahler 10y ago
>> _And_ that short employment stint is a black-mark on Jake's resume. What an industry we have. But now he can just point people to that WTF piece and say "that's what that was". Anyone who still considers it a black mark after that isn't worth working for. I have a 5-month stint at a huge company on my resume - one that a lot of people would really like to work for. It comes up sometimes in interviews, but I've got a good story behind it and usually come off as capable and ambitious after explaining it. If something raises a question, ask it. Don't just assume the worst of a candidate.
- chadgeidel 10y ago
  I agree. If a company isn't willing to give me the benefit of the doubt by asking, then maybe it's another place I'm not interested in working.
mcphage 10y ago
Why would Jake even list it on his resume? He was there two weeks, it's not worth it.

WDCDev 10y ago

Run for the hills any time anyone says, "It's our in-house developed DSL!". It's a virtual guarantee that whatever was cooked up is some sort of insanity like JDSL.

pjc50 10y ago
So how does one avoid this trap? I've occasionally thought of using a DSL for some business logic, presumably the best way is to at least use an existing language (like Tcl) and provide business-specific verbs in it?
- WDCDev 10y ago
  Don't build a DSL for a production system, period. Production quality DSLs are for academics and/or staff engineers that have enough time and resources to build and maintain them. I don't know about you, but I have a constant backlog of features with tons of interesting problems to solve. There are places where I could build a DSL, but I am not going to because I would inevitably build something hacky and brittle that is impossible to understand and maintain (like JDSL). I can't build new features, and increase the value of the system if my DSL is constantly breaking the system. So don't do it. There is plenty of functionality on the .NET and Ruby platforms for me to model the concepts and objects in the domain without the need for a DSL.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    Oh, this reminds me. I once worked for a company that used RDF for all configuration and scripting for one of its main applications. Instead of using one of the standard methods of encoding RDF (turtle, XML, etc.) our main architect wrote his own. Specifically, he wrote an encoding based on Google Sheets. The triples were the row header, the column header, and the cell value. There were two special tables; one containing namespace aliases and one containing an index of all the tables in the spreadsheet. To deploy, you published a Google Sheet to the web, copied the sheet key, and pasted it into a variable in the Java code's main() function (and we had a few different main classes for a few different deployment types). Later on, he added support for encoding RDF in XLSX spreadsheets so we don't need an Internet connection to launch the app. Let's just say that architect and I didn't get along (and he didn't get along with a good chunk of the devs either; multiple people I worked very well with quit during my time at that company largely because they couldn't get along with him). If you want to see it, the code is open-source (some of their content is proprietary, but there's an open-source RDF store in the public repos that has the proprietary stuff removed and replaced with demo content). It forms part of the appdapter project on Assembla [0] (but only part of it; there's other random stuff in appdapter too), and there are some sample main() functions in the friendularity project on Asssembla [1] (friendularity was our repository of open-source main classes; they mostly just import stuff from other open-source projects and wrap it in a main()). Honestly, though, I didn't touch the appdapter part of the codebase when I worked there, and it's been a couple of years since I've worked there, so I don't think I can help much with running it. I think org.friendularity.bundle.demo.ccmio (or maybe org.friendularity.bundle.launcher.oglweb) is the relevant main project, but I don't remember too well, and I think some things have been refactored since we left. [0] https://app.assembla.com/spaces/appdapter/subversion/source https://app.assembla.com/spaces/appdapter/subversion/source [1] https://app.assembla.com/spaces/friendularity/subversion/source https://app.assembla.com/spaces/friendularity/subversion/sou...

diyseguy 10y ago

This story is like a parable that condenses all my work experiences so far. The problem is that management is easily terrified and impressed by anyone who can flummox them with tech buzzwords and knows just enough programming to be dangerous. They get in early, create a horrific mess that takes other people at least a year to untangle enough to be able to maintain. The company talks forever about rewriting it - but everyone's too busy putting out fires in the spaghetti to work on the newer better architecture. Really, most of the crap these 'geniuses' write could be quickly replaced with something off the open source shelf. But the customers are too entrenched in the proprietary spaghetti, so they can't, etc. And every new 6 figure tech guy they hire just tries to create his own cozy nest of over complex code in a sad attempt to create job security. Its all a scam.

mrsheen 10y ago

What's the name of the company? Their customers deserve to know that story.

firephreek 10y ago

This isn't real right? It's just a made up story to scare, right??

overgard 10y ago

Sometimes I think the industry's obsession with "code reuse" is what enables these architecture astronauts in the first place. If people accepted that most code is ephemeral and never going to be reused, then architecture astronauts have much less idealogical cover for their disastrous schemes. Pretty much the only example of code reuse gone well is open-source libraries; and that's because being public forces the code to be documented and free of implicit dependencies. You pretty much never get that with janky internal frameworks and libraries, and they're usually "reusable" and yet replaced next project.

nameless912 10y ago
Right? I mean, special snowflake libraries that everyone can use do exist, don't get me wrong, but they're usually created by people whose sole job it was to create exactly that, a reusable API for <insert domain here>. There's very rarely an opportunity to repurpose old code in a new project if the goal of "API-izing" it wasn't in mind when it was written, and many times when people try it's a disaster. If code could be re-used efficiently, we wouldn't need half as many programmers as we actually legitimately do.
dexwiz 10y ago
This a thousand times.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

jpalomaki 10y ago

Think about all those dependency management systems (npm, Maven, NuGet). Look at a project with huge number of dependencies, picking on piece of functionality from one library, something else from another. All tied together with some depedencies file and maybe with some additional dependency injection magic. Not backed up by version control, but instead the package repository. Not that many projects add a real DSL, but I think you can end up pretty close also with just objects and language features. And where do you then run this system? Of course in Docker container, probably picking up Linux components with apt-get from left and right.

AgentME 10y ago
The bad things in the article were the inner-platform effect and that the inner-platform was especially terrible (no comment support, tons of boilerplate, abuse of the project's own source control, lack of dev/production split). I really don't think the concept of versioned dependencies was one of the bad parts.
emsy 10y ago
Sure dependencies can become absurd (like the NPM left-pad story). But should we on the other hand always code everything from scratch? Where does it end?

new_hackers 10y ago

Did anyone else notice the part about checking into the trunk? I agree that the framework and people were definitely WTF. However, I would at least have talked to someone before committing to the trunk, even if I thought I was just adding comments.

pjungwir 10y ago

I think the more interesting question is: when can something crazy like this work? I started writing a comment about that here, but it got long enough I turned it into its own blog post. Here is my submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12188087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12188087

mywittyname 10y ago

This reminds me how I always seem to fall into the "find and program to the pattern" anti-pattern. I am Tom.

outworlder 10y ago

This story could be fiction, but I don't think so. For starters, it takes some serious imagination to come up with a system so broken. And I have seen a system, written in a javascript dialect, execute by an in-house javascript engine written in Delphi, that you had to use the in-house IDE because it was the only way one could find the desired functions. You see, the 'module' system worked by referencing database IDs, from a database table that contained the javascript "file" you wanted to import...

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

I would kick Tom in the jingle berries... so hard ... that every time he ever came up with a crazy idea like this he would ache.

Furincer 10y ago

Satire aside, couldn't they just revert the commits? That is the whole point of the system. ONLY if the system didn't work would Tom be angry, but IF the system didn't work then the rest of the story is contradictory.

winstonewert 10y ago
reverting the commits won't bring back the deleted database
- iraphael 10y ago
  which brings up the other problem of why aren't there backups

nojvek 10y ago

Didn't they have code reviews ?

paloaltokid 10y ago

My WTF entry: I worked at a company whose main website was written in J2EE. This was here in the Bay Area, right in downtown SF. When I joined, I soon learned about "Stephen". Stephen had already left the company but he was still very much a presence. Most of his comments contained expletives, even for something simple like changing a log level: "tell Tomcat to shut the fuck up!" Throughout the wiki, there were references to technical "discussions" around coding standards that often had statements like "Stephen doesn't like this!", which was short for "I don't want to get yelled at so we'll do what Stephen says". There were a lot of things Stephen didn't like. He didn't like Java. He didn't like private methods. He seemed on the fence about getters and setters. But he loved Python. Boy howdy did he love Python. Stephen loved Python so much that much of the Java codebase was uneditable. Yes, uneditable. You see, in order to write the Java code that'd be actually, you know, run in production, you didn't simply open IDEA and write Java. You wrote Python code that emitted Java. Hibernate configs, classes, the lot. Development time wasn't the fastest. Something else Stephen hated was MySQL. He hated it a lot. Postgres was way better in his opinion. Stephen hated MySQL so much that he stripped it out of all the Puppet files one day because he didn't think the company should be running it. Nevermind that he was editing the production files for another team, so the next time Puppet ran, the predictable outcome occurred. I believe that was one of the few times his actions had any direct consequences for him. Beyond Stephen and his hatred of all things non-Python and MySQL, the deployment process was a true thing of horrifying beauty. You see, one didn't simply just drop a WAR file into Tomcat and restart the server process. That'd be much too simple. When you deployed, you deployed everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Apache? Compiled from source and re-installed. Java? Compiled from source and re-installed. Name a dependency other than Postgres and that ish was compiled from source and re-installed. Deploying any code change was a minimum 45-minute process. Heaven help you if a bug was found. (Oh yeah, and of course Stephen's domain user couldn't be removed from Perforce or any of the build systems because all the scripts ran as his user. Nobody knew what might happen if his user was removed. To this day the company still exists after an acquisition and I'd bet good money that Stephen's user is still out there consuming CPU cycles.) My takeaway from this experience is that this kind of environment is pretty common, and it's because of some basic psychology in people. Engineers don't want to look stupid and their social skills are often not developed. So when you meet someone with a strong personality who uses shouting to establish technical superiority, they can get a long way.

MWil 10y ago

Is there any easy way to recreate that blocked visualization of the JSON?

WhiteNoiz3 10y ago

I've come to believe that 'clever' solutions are almost always a bad idea. You should err on the side of best practices. Defying expected norms means that other people aren't going to be able understand your code or maintain it. This is a pretty spectacularly bad example of that. I've actually worked on sites that did similar stuff to this - having multiple versions of the code checked out on the same server with references to files in specific commits.