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... You got the source code, and it was 115 kloc of BASIC, but several other individuals and organizations failed to "reverse-engineer" it?
by zahlman 9mo ago
... You got the source code, and it was 115 kloc of BASIC, but several other individuals and organizations failed to "reverse-engineer" it?
- benstopics 9mo agoI'm sorry what is the question?
- dwedge 9mo agoI think they were nitpicking the term "reverse engineering" which is fair if the source is available
- selcuka 9mo agoThe source was available, but with cryptic variable names and (apparently) no or little comments: > Ward mentioned that the biggest bottleneck was the cryptic variable names—short abbreviations that were common in old-school programming but made the code nearly impossible to follow. > "He not only commented everything," Ward marveled, "he went through every single line of code and renamed every single variable for me in about three days. I think it's still fair to use the term "reverse engineering".
- baq 9mo agoMeh, every time a new engineer joins a large project onboarding is actually reverse engineering, with luck assisted by original authors.
- benstopics 9mo agoOthers attempted to build from scratch or port it without the original developer's involvement. I worked directly with Michael and built a bridge layer into his existing codebase rather than rewriting it.
- zahlman 9mo agoAh, I understand now.