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> I have maintained 200k line Perl programs written by someone who never stopped to ponder anything outside the problem domain Ditto, though I think I have a u
by fuzzix 13y ago
> I have maintained 200k line Perl programs written by someone who never stopped to ponder anything outside the problem domain
Ditto, though I think I have a unique element to my story.
I spent a week deleting code I couldn't detect a use for. I nuked nearly 40,000 lines and could not discern a difference in functionality (though, couldn't be certain since I hadn't completed the test suite.)
Writing a test suite for software with no spec and only others' vague recollections of meetings to go on (Agile!) is fun - it basically ends up a regression suite enforcing current broken behaviour.
Perl takes no part of the blame for this, some of the Rails code needs to be seen to be believed - looked like an early PHP tutorial in places.
What was great was, the Perl was full of comments about how much easier it would have been in Ruby/Rails because he never bothered to read the docs on references.
- einhverfr 13y ago> I spent a week deleting code I couldn't detect a use for. I nuked nearly 40,000 lines and could not discern a difference in functionality (though, couldn't be certain since I hadn't completed the test suite.) I don't think we deleted 20k lines. Probably more like 5k. However the kicker was when deleting something that seemed harmless enough broke something. In that case, it was a comment. We're not talking about smart comments here. We are talking about comments that are parsed and used by the application at run-time for actual logic :-P. Oh, and when we added test cases for rounding numbers.... the test cases failed.... Regarding the role of language, I would much rather be maintaining bad Perl code than bad PHP code.....