Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by stcredzero 2871 days ago
"(Also, after seeing the below 350-line function that's part of a 3113-line file, I now know that whenever I'm yelling at CSS layout behaving weirdly, there's someone with a much, much more frustrating job.)"

At my job, our group recently refactored a file from over 30000 lines down to 17000. I've also seen, on multiple occasions, single methods in Smalltalk applications that exceeded 32KB and therefore broke the compiler! (The egregious sins of Smalltalk shops were weirdly parallel. The egregious sins of Smalltalk vendors were also weirdly parallel, come to think of it.)

1 comments

Holy cow, in Smalltalk? I thought it was considered exceptionally bad form in Smalltalk to write a method that didn't all fit on your screen.
I've seen entire major subsystems written without a single instance variable and without a single instance method -- in Smalltalk -- in an application responsible for multi billions of dollars in transactions at a Fortune 500 company. The depths of how bad is, in bad corporate code is kind of amazing. Though in fairness, I think those super long methods resulted from auto-generated methods that became cut and paste hand maintained.
Yikes. I've seen that in small scale, with copypasted auto-generated code (although not Smalltalk) reaching 5k lines or so at a manufacturing company. But what you're talking about is a whole other level of bad.