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One of my first programming gigs was working on a 1970s-vintage, 100KLoC+ FORTRAN IV codebase. All one file. No subroutines. No comments. Three-letter varia
by ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
One of my first programming gigs was working on a 1970s-vintage, 100KLoC+ FORTRAN IV codebase.
All one file.
No subroutines.
No comments.
Three-letter variable names.
LOTS of GOTOs.
VT-100 300-Baud terminals.
Inspired me to never do that to anyone else[0].
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/leaving-a-legacy/ https://littlegreenviper.com/leaving-a-legacy/
- vharuck 2y ago>Three-letter variable names. You're giving me flashbacks to all the SAS code I inherited. The tables had three-letter names like "AAA" and "BBB", and all the columns had single-letter names. Wasn't long before I completely rewrote the entire thing (a couple times, because I wrote junk, too).
- jprete 2y agoWhen I hear stories of programmers who put a moat around their jobs with incomprehensible code, I usually assume it's exaggerated, but in your case I wonder if that's exactly what happened.