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Ask HN: What are some poorly written but very successful open source software?
- danielvf 10y agoJoomla - both code and UI were beyond horrible, but I still turn down random Joomla projects on a yearly basis.
- eigenbom 10y agoBrowsing the source of games like Nethack and Battle for Wesnoth (around a decade ago) opened my eyes - sometimes code quality can seem poor but the product can be great. Blender is another one that seems very ramshackle and complex. I won't go as far as saying it's poorly written, but it's a product of many contributors, including students, and yet it's an amazing piece of software. This thread is not meant to be a criticism of projects, but a celebration that code quality is not the be all and end all.
- panic 10y agoNethack has great code! It's very easy to follow and has tons of comments.
- eigenbom 10y agoThe comments are great but for me it's old-style c makes it hard to follow, it uses lots of short var names that are forward declared, doesn't pass length with char* arrays, etc. But I don't want to criticise any particular thing, because it works amazingly well. It's one of my top 10 games.
- logronoide 10y agoAny Java plugin for Minecraft written by teenagers looks like a heresy for Enterprise Java developers...
- informatimago 10y agoopenssl!
- stevekemp 10y agoHave you ever read the man-page for telnet? On my Debian system the last two lines read: BUGS The source code is not comprehensible. That's probably one of the dividing lines. There are many programs that have "bad" source code, but which are still essential. Another measure of "badness" could be how extensible, or not a program might be. Or even how many security-holes. With regard to security holes some projects such as Wordpress or Wireshark crop up too often. But honestly? Most of the badly written programs aren't so bad, if you ignore a couple of outliers. If the benefits outweigh the drawbacks then the software leaves the world a better place.
- sayelt 10y agoVim.
- akkartik 10y agoAs a long-time cheerleader for Vim, I totally agree. Vim is a paradoxical beast: incredibly convoluted code almost (but not quite) rescued by extremely great documentation.
- mondoshawan 10y agoThough I live and breathe it, emacs C source base is amazingly nasty. The fact that it still uses redisplay and memory dumps after integrating so many improvements over the years...
- larrykubin 10y agoWordPress, phpNuke, phpBB, most of the old PHP CMSes and E-Commerce systems. The code is dirty and hacky, but the software is useful for millions of people.
- UnoriginalGuy 10y agoLast time I looked PHPNuke was horrifying, PHPBB was just outdated, and WordPress was pretty damn good. A lot of people assume WordPress is poorly written because it got a reputation for being insecure. But modern WordPress is pretty well written and in part due to its automatic update mechanism pretty secure. When was the last time you looked at WordPress?
- nodesocket 10y agoI completely forgot about PHPNuke. Damn, that brings back memories.
- stephenr 10y ago> WordPress was pretty damn good Building your own userland SQL Prepared Statements 'replacement' using string replacement is not "pretty damn good". WordPress is notorious for refusing to drop support for ancient, unsupported versions of PHP. WordPress is a fucking terrible solution to any problem, from a technical point of view.
- ruslan_talpa 10y agoIt seems to be solving 25% of all the problems https://martechtoday.com/wordpress-used-on-25-percent-of-all-websites-report-151115 https://martechtoday.com/wordpress-used-on-25-percent-of-all...
- stephenr 10y agoI said it's technically a piece of garbage, confirming that it fits very much in the topic of "poorly written but very successful" That 25% of sites use it just proves the successful part, and says nothing about how appropriate it is technically.
- Animats 10y agoSendmail.
- nicolaslem 10y agoThe chapter about Sendmail in Architecture of Open Source Applications[1] gives an explanations as to why it is so convoluted. Sendmail was originally written when TCP/IP and SMTP did not even exist. [1] http://aosabook.org/en/sendmail.html http://aosabook.org/en/sendmail.html
- Animats 10y agoThat's not the real problem. Sendmail was written when databases didn't exist in the UNIX world and before UNIX had locking mechanisms. Many of the legacy problems with UNIX/Linux come from components which maintain a database with special purpose code. Sendmail, BIND, login/passwd, etc.
- splitbrain 10y agovTiger CRM. The worst code I have ever seen but still used by lots of businesses.
- forzo 10y agoYes, that's 200% true. After few customization, my programming skills goes down by 50%. I forgot some basic syntax.
- tuananh 10y agoI don't know the details but i've read sth similar regarding Calibre.
- anotheryou 10y agoknowing the frontend I can imagine how it looks beneath
- zhte415 10y agoIt does OK being able to get stuff out of Calibre.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nunez 10y agoI wouldn't touch OpenSSL with a ten foot pole.
- LarryMade2 10y agoI heard OpenOffice was a mess years back though I don't know about now.
- randombit 10y agoThe source code of procmail is terrifying
- leovonl 10y agoIf you consider: 1) Most of Linux source code is composed of drivers; 2) Most drivers for Linux have really bad quality code, with very few exceptions; Then Linux is a perfect example.
- runT1ME 10y agoDocker.
- smilesnd 10y agoDrupal, wordpress, docker, xamarin, unity. and mono