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I've seen a massive, "simple", abstraction-free function of 500-1000 lines take smart engineers quarters to safely "factor". I've seen this same thing happen a

I've seen a massive, "simple", abstraction-free function of 500-1000 lines take smart engineers quarters to safely "factor". I've seen this same thing happen a handful of times. Big spaghetti function requires someone to build a new test suite from scratch so that they can refactor safely, because everything ends up having spooky surprising distant effects, because there isn't any abstraction to contain things. They're dead simple, there's no abstraction, its just loops and variables (and state, which is the real killer). But they're impossible to reason about as a result.

titzer 4y ago
Sure, this happens. But imagine it was 10 times that size and factory poorly. If you had the same lack of tests, I'd contend it'd be a worse nightmare, because you have to first reverse engineer the confusing old design, unconfuse it, and then incrementally refactor it. You can write bad code in any language with any constructs. The more code you do write the worse bad ideas just metastasize like cancer.