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I had the pleasure of retiring a large APL application a few years ago. Although I hadn’t spent time developing in it, I did spend a lot of time with the devs w
by lucozade 9y ago
I had the pleasure of retiring a large APL application a few years ago. Although I hadn’t spent time developing in it, I did spend a lot of time with the devs who had. I also had to understand it well enough to replace it.
I’ve worked on a lot of systems and a fair few languages in my time. I’d rank it as the 3rd worst application I’ve ever dealt with.
It’s also one of the few where I didn’t end up with a grudging admiration for the original developers. And I’ve replaced a “real time” event based system written in Sybase stored procs so I have a really low threshold.
- girvo 9y agoWhat were the two other worse applications?
- lucozade 9y agoThe worst, as a piece of code, was a Byzantine C++ application. It had been written with abstractions and indirections to cater for every conceivable eventuality. And it seemed to incubate Heisenbugs. Usually, with a C++ app you can fix it incrementally but we tried and it was just impossible. Far too intertwined. In the end I wrote a replacement from scratch. The other one was a Smalltalk system. Actually, pretty well written and documented. But once Smalltalk gets above a certain size it can become impossible to reason about. And it’s very hard to replace parts. Sadly, this one was a failure. It never got fixed or replaced. Just went out of business.
- nickpeterson 9y agoI would love more particulars about this.