4 ms·

The effort to untangle a 500 million year old codebase with zero comments leads to some strange discoveries.

• greenbit 3y ago
  With janky disassemblers, for an incompletely understood massively parallel processing environment, featuring non-deterministic execution into the bargain. Yeah. Going to need more coffee..
• laszlojamf 3y ago
  Plus no tests, no original developers, and most of the time - _but just most of the time_ - it "just works"...
  • sigmoid10 3y ago
    I'd say the coding and testing toolchain doesn't work most of the time. In fact it rarely does. But since we only see code changes that didn't kill the entire system permanently, we're left with a a huge amount of legacy trash and a few things on top of it that worked out by amazing coincidences accumulated over millions of years.
    • LocalH 3y ago
      So what you're saying is that the universe does cargo cult :kekw:
      • sigmoid10 3y ago
        It's even worse. A cargo cult has a reasonable, comparatively narrow scenario or goal to start with.
        • LocalH 3y ago
          I mean, from the universe's perspective, the whole of Earth is a quite small thing
  • astrange 3y ago
    There's an integration test called natural selection.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• Netcob 3y ago
  And you do NOT want to get the "unbounded replication error"
• inglor_cz 3y ago
  Biology is probably the most obvious example of a maze of Chesterton fences all around. The systems evolved spontaneously, with no design plan beforehand, so they often don't make immediate sense to us, logical creatures. Many of the features are weird, but we must be careful around them, because we don't know which purpose they serve or once served. https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/