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[HN Gopher] -2000 Lines of code
___________________________________________________________________
-2000 Lines of code
Author : xeonmc
Score : 432 points
Date : 2025-06-25 19:53 UTC (19 hours ago)
web link (www.folklore.org)
w3m dump (www.folklore.org)
| daitangio wrote:
| Software metric are hard, indeed :) Be prepared in a ai-code
| world when more code does not mean better code.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I've been watching my colleagues' adoption of Copilot with
| interest. From what I can tell, the people who are the most
| convinced that it improves their productivity have an
| understanding of developer productivity that is very much in
| line with that of the managers in this story.
|
| Recently I refactored about 8,000 lines of vibe-coded bloat
| down into about 40 lines that ran ten times as fast, required
| 1/20 as much memory, and eliminated both the defect I was
| tasked with resolving and several others that I found along the
| way. (Tangentially, LLM-generated unit tests never cease to
| amaze me.) The PHBs didn't particularly appreciate my efforts,
| either. We've got a very expensive Copilot Enterprise license
| to continue justifying.
| api wrote:
| I see a stratified software market in the future.
|
| There will be vibe and amateur banged out hustle trash, which
| will be the cheap plastic cutlery of the software world.
|
| There will be lovingly hand crafted by experts code (possibly
| using some AI but in the hands of someone who knows their
| shit) that will be like the fine stuff and will cost many
| times more.
|
| A lot of stuff will get prototyped as crap and then if it
| gets traction reimplemented with quality.
| librasteve wrote:
| yeah this is it ...
| doesnt_know wrote:
| This was said about large frameworks like electron on the
| desktop, but outside of some specific technical niches it
| literally doesn't matter to end users.
| kbelder wrote:
| It does matter and they do care; they just don't have the
| specific technical knowledge to pinpoint _why_ their
| computer sucks now.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| And why it takes months to years to fix basic bugs that
| have been acknowledged by the developer.
| Miraste wrote:
| Where's the part where it's different from the existing
| market?
| api wrote:
| What I meant was that the contrast will become much more
| extreme, like the difference between fine silverware and
| bulk plastic cutlery from Wal-Mart.
|
| Pre-vibe-coding it was more like the difference between
| fine silverware and cheap stamped metal stuff.
| bitwize wrote:
| Back in the day, if you went to a website you could always
| tell who wrote their HTML by hand and who used a tool like
| GruntPage, Dreamweaver, etc. even without looking at the
| META tags. The by-hand stuff was like a polished jewel that
| had only as much layout, styling, and markup as needed to
| get the desired effect. The proprietary web editor stuff
| was encrusted with extraneous tags and vendor-specific
| extensions (like mso: attributes and styles in GruntPage).
|
| Then as now, if you let the machine do the thinking for
| you, the result was a steaming mess. Up to you if that was
| accessible (and for many, it was).
| wffurr wrote:
| You can make the same claim about compiled code vs hand
| written assembly, and yet the vast majority of software
| is compiled or interpreted.
| DowsingSpoon wrote:
| In the past, hand-crafted assembly code was common
| because it was easy to beat the compiler. This is still
| true today in some niches.
| dgfitz wrote:
| A compiler is written by very smart humans to a spec
| written by humans, also probably smart but I don't know
| enough to claim that bit.
|
| An LLM is just displaying the next statistical token.
|
| Completely different.
| bitwize wrote:
| Or, as I like to put it, pulling out the next
| refrigerator poetry tile from a stochastic bag of
| holding.
| robocat wrote:
| A beautiful vision.
|
| If the vision were true, we should see it happen with
| normal goods too. Quality physical goods do not beat the
| shit goods in the market : crap furniture is the canonical
| example (with blog articles discussing the issue).
|
| Software (and movies) is free for subsequent copies, so at
| first sight you might think software is completely
| different from physical goods.
|
| However for most factory produced goods, designing and
| building the factory is the major cost. The marginal cost
| of producing each copy of an item might be reasonably low
| (highly dependent on raw materials and labor costs?).
|
| Many expensive physical goods are dominated by the initial
| design costs, so an expensive Maserati might be complete
| shit (bought for image status or Veblen reasons, not
| because it is high quality). There's a reason why the best
| products are often midrange. The per unit 2..n reproduction
| cost of cheap physical goods is always low almost by
| definition.
|
| Some parts of iPhone software are high quality (e.g. the
| security is astounding). Some parts are bad. Apple
| monetisation adds non-optional features that have negative
| value to me: however those features have positive value to
| Apple.
| api wrote:
| What happens is the price difference gets huge. Quality
| furniture does beat shit at the high end of the market,
| but a real quality bed or sofa costs over a thousand
| dollars and up from there. The price difference between
| shit and quality _starts_ at 5-10X.
|
| Tangent but -- one furniture hack I've found is that if
| you don't want to pay a lot go for the simplest design
| you can find made of basic wood or metal. It'll be... a
| wood or metal kit that assembles into the basic form of
| what is needed. Wood is often unfinished or minimally
| finished. That stuff is pretty durable. Things that
| _look_ "fancy" but are cheap tend to be utter trash, made
| of the worst materials with poor tolerances. A more
| elaborate or artistic design plus quality equals
| expensive.
|
| When I say minimal I mean minimal. A cheap quality bed
| frame is a rack the mattress sits on. A cheap quality
| dresser is basically bins on tracks.
|
| Ironically places like Amazon is where you find this
| cheap quality minimal stuff. Furniture stores are
| complete trash unless they are artisan, often local, like
| I live in Ohio and there are artisan Amish furniture
| sellers that sell good (but $$$) stuff that is literally
| hand made. But find one that is actually sourcing or even
| tied to an Amish community. You don't have to look into
| the store, just the stuff inside. It will be solid and
| build via obvious craft joinery, etc., and will weigh a
| ton. (and you're supporting a local community)
|
| So I wonder if software will start to look like that. Pay
| a lot (like enterprise prices) for highly regarded pro
| software or find something minimal "hand made" by a 1-5
| person shop. The world of quality native Mac apps comes
| to mind for the latter.
| switchbak wrote:
| "8,000 lines of vibe-coded bloat down into about 40 lines"
| ... I just saw a vision of my future and shuddered.
|
| I mean, I like killing crappy code as much as the next guy,
| but I don't want that to be my daily existence. Ugggh.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I would love to know the time balance between the two
| activities. It takes nothing to generate slop, but could be
| weeks to extricate it.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| > Tangentially, LLM-generated unit tests never cease to amaze
| me.
|
| In a good or bad way?
|
| I've found AI pretty helpful to write tests, specially if you
| already have an existing one as a template.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I don't believe your numbers unless your colleagues are
| exceptionally bad programmers.
|
| I'm using AI a lot too. I don't accept all the changes if
| they look bad. I also keep things concise. I've never seen it
| generate something so bad I could delete 99 percent of it.
| WD-42 wrote:
| 90%+ is a stretch. Anecdotally I have cleaned up a vibe
| coded PR and removed at least half of the code. The thing
| with the LLM is that often they will make some decision up
| front that has downstream ramifications for how the entire
| project's code is structured. I don't think I've seen an
| LLM re-visit it's assumptions, instead they code around
| them.
|
| In the case I saw, it was rust code and the LLM typed some
| argument as a Arc<Mutex<_>> when it absolutely did not need
| to, which caused the entire PR to inflate. The vibe coder
| apparently didn't catch this and just kept it vibing...
| Technically the code did what it needed to do but was super
| inefficient.
|
| It would have been easy for me to just accept the PR. It
| technically worked. But it was garbage.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Yes. This is why I'm still "designing" projects and
| asking fairly specific things most of the time.
|
| But it's pretty obvious when it produces garbage. So
| you'd reject it there and then. At the very least code
| review will raise so many questions. How did 8000 lines
| make it into the code base?
| WD-42 wrote:
| I think you are over-estimating how much people care. If
| the code runs and provides the desired result, there are
| many, many people who will simply ship it. This is the
| bed we made for ourselves.
| akavi wrote:
| I've never seen 8000 -> 40, but I have done ~10 kLoC ->
| ~600.
|
| Aggggressively "You can write Java in any language" style
| JavaScript (` _Factory`, `_ Strategy`, etc) plus a whole
| mini state machine framework that was replaceable with
| judicious use of iterators.
|
| (This was at Google, and I suspected it was a promo project
| gone metastatic.)
| amluto wrote:
| Every now and then, in between reasonable and almost-
| reasonable suggestions, Copilot will suggest a pile of code,
| stylistically consistent with the function I'm editing, the
| extends clear off the bottom of the page. I haven't been
| inspired to hit tab a couple times and try to reverse
| engineer the resulting vomit of code, but I can easily
| imagine a new programmer accepting the code because AI! or,
| perhaps worse, hitting tab without even noticing.
| uaas wrote:
| This is also true for human code, more often than not.
| bearjaws wrote:
| This is one of those stories that I am sure has happened, but
| when it comes to "and then they never asked him again le XD face"
| it's clearly just made up.
| Scuds wrote:
| management could have decided on a process change. Simple as
| that.
|
| I get the sentiment though, "He blew management's mind so much
| they made an exception for him".
|
| But, Folklore.org is a bit less onanistic than ESR's jargon
| file.
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| I've pulled stunts like this that makes management realize its
| easier to make an exception than to fight it
| sokoloff wrote:
| We had free soft drinks in the fridges at one place I worked.
| Cost-cutting measures were coming and I sent an email to all
| of engineering (including the VP) asking who wanted to join
| me in a shopping trip at 10AM to restock the fridge. In the
| email, I estimated that it would take between 60 and 90
| minutes. Two carfuls of engineers left at 10AM sharp and
| returned a little before noon and restocked the fridges.
|
| That was the first and last time we had to do it, as the soft
| drinks returned the following week.
| _benton wrote:
| I imagine management realized it was far cheaper to buy
| some soda than it was to lose 2 hours of work from multiple
| engineers
| sokoloff wrote:
| That was exactly the point of the protest that was
| couched as totally-not-a-protest.
|
| (I skipped clarifying in the GP post that they took the
| soft drinks out of the fridge and emailed the new policy,
| rather than merely being a little slow in restocking.)
| throwawaymobule wrote:
| See also: removing coffee machines.
|
| Too many forget that it's one of the few legal ways to
| supply your employees with performance enhancing drugs.
| dzdt wrote:
| Air quality (reduced CO2 or increased O2) is a proven
| performance enhancer and also legal but almost always
| neglected. Not sure why tho!
| jonstewart wrote:
| Bill Atkinson recently died and there's a great HN discussion
| about him. He had a good relationship with Steve Jobs; it's
| reasonable to assume it's true that he got left alone,
| especially if Andy Hertzfeld is the person making the
| assertion.
| disruptiveink wrote:
| It was Bill fucking Atkinson. Not a disposable random
| contractor you hire by the dozen when you need to build more
| CRUD APIs.
|
| At that time at Apple, even as an IC, Bill had lines of
| communication to Steve and was extremely valued. There's
| absolutely no doubt he could get "middle manager shenanigans"
| gone simply by not complying or "maliciously complying". Hell,
| I've seen ICs far less valuable, or even close to negative
| value get away with stunts far worse than these, succeed and
| keep their jobs. Out of all the stories in Folklore.org, this
| is the one you have an issue with?!
| bearjaws wrote:
| Most people know who Bill Atkinson on this forum. The story
| premise that he wrote negative code isn't my gripe, I am sure
| it happened.
|
| The outcome where all of a sudden leadership just shit its
| pants and doesn't communicate at all and never followed up...
| It's like writing "and then everyone clapped" for
| programmers.
| lmm wrote:
| Man you must have only worked with really good management.
| "Management realised the stupid policy change they
| announced with great fanfare was stupid, stopped doing it,
| and never mentioned it again" is something I've seen
| several times in my career.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| It just occurred to me that really good management is
| like a fruit at the optimum of its ripeness - it stays
| that way only for a while so enjoy it while it lasts
| otherwise it will rot and stink.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > The outcome where all of a sudden leadership just shit
| its pants and doesn't communicate at all and never followed
| up...
|
| This is not only a possible outcome, it is a common one.
| When leadership realizes it was a mistake to instill one of
| these types of "productivity motivators", it is easier to
| disappear it and never (officially) speak of it again.
| smugma wrote:
| 1. The site is called folklore.org. You're sort of saying the
| site is true to its name.
|
| 2. It's a direct recollection from someone who was there, not
| an unnamed "my cousin's best friend" or literal folklore that
| is passed down by oral tradition. Andy knew Bill and was there.
| There is no clear motivation to tell a fictional story when
| there were so many real ones.
|
| 3. The specifics line up very well with what we know about Bill
| Atkinson and some his wizardry needed to make the Mac work.
|
| Given this, it's much easier to assume that your assertion is
| what is made up.
| Scuds wrote:
| This being Lisa that's -2000 lines in 68k assembler. That's about
| as verbose as any real PL can ever get.
|
| For what it's worth, here's quicksort in 5 lines of haskell
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7717691/why-is-the-minim...
| qsort wrote:
| Not true quicksort though :)
|
| That's the problem with comparing lines of code: you're
| comparing apples and oranges. In this case you aren't even
| solving the same problem.
| sreekotay wrote:
| Are... are you comparing quicksort to... Quickdraw?
|
| Lol - ok that's genuinely funny :). _slow clap_
| kragen wrote:
| That's not quicksort, though, because it's not in place; the
| actual quicksort on that page is in
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/7833043, which is 11 lines of code.
| That's still pretty concise. My own preferred concise, or at
| least terse, presentation of quicksort is
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/paperalgo#addtoc_20.
|
| How long would a quicksort (say, of integers) be in 68000
| assembly? Maybe 20 lines? My 68000 isn't very good. The real
| advantage of writing it in Haskell is that it's automatically
| applicable to anything that's Ord, that is, ordered.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > How long would a quicksort (say, of integers) be in 68000
| assembly?
|
| About 70 lines, once you strip out the comments and blank
| lines.
|
| https://github.com/historicalsource/supermario/blob/9dd3c4be.
| ..
| kragen wrote:
| This is great, thanks! I was thinking it could be much
| simpler, but it looks like I was mistaken.
|
| I'm trying to code up a version in ARM assembly to compare,
| and it looks like it'll be about 30 lines; when I get that
| working I can compare to see why the difference. In some
| ways the 68000 is more expressive than ARM, like being able
| to reference memory directly, even twice in one
| instruction.
|
| (Am I misunderstanding this, or is this the source code to
| Apple System 7.1? There seems to have been a mailing list
| about this codebase from 02018 to 02021:
| https://lists.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/pipermail/cdg5/)
| flohofwoe wrote:
| If you think 68k assembler is 'verbose' you haven't seen x86
| yet ;)
| meepmorp wrote:
| > For what it's worth, here's quicksort in 5 lines of haskell
|
| QuickDraw was a graphics library, not a sorting algorithm
| Meneth wrote:
| NoScript link:
| https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
| xeonmc wrote:
| Thanks. @dang update URL?
| jfengel wrote:
| In college I worked for a company whose goal was to prove that
| their management techniques could get a bunch of freshman to
| write quality code.
|
| They couldn't. I would go find the code that caused a bug, fix it
| and discover that the bug was still there. Because previous
| students had, rather than add a parameter to a function, would
| make a copy and slightly modify it.
|
| I deleted about 3/4 of their code base (thousands of lines of
| Turbo Pascal) that fall.
|
| Bonus: the customer was the Department of Energy, and the program
| managed nuclear material inventory. Sleep tight.
| uticus wrote:
| > make a copy and slightly modify it
|
| In addition to not breaking existing code, also has added
| benefit of boosting personal contribution metrics in eyes of
| management. Oh and it's really easy to revert things - all I
| have to do is find the latest copy and delete it. It'll work
| great, promise.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I mean...when you have a pile of spaghetti, there is only so
| much you can do.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Ask for more staff, reorganize the team into a set of
| multiple teams, and hire more middle management! Win win
| for the manager.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Add tests to the function as it exists today. Submit. Add
| new functionality, make sure tests still pass. Done.
| Updating a function here and there shouldn't require more
| staff.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| This implies adding tests that accurately capture all the
| nuances of the function and don't test the simplest logic
| need to hit code coverage. When we are talking someone
| new to the function, then this is about the same as
| asking them to learn the function so they can be sure
| they didn't make an error when they changed it. The
| benefit of tests is that they are written by the person
| creating the function originally who is most aware of the
| hidden dangers of it.
|
| I'm distrustful on unit testing as I've seen too many
| tests written to make code coverage numbers but that
| don't actually test the functions they are aimed at. A
| non-trivial number which run the function asynchronously
| and then report a successful run before the function even
| finishes executing, meaning that even throwing errors
| don't fail the tests (granted, part of that is on the
| testing framework for letting unexpected errors ever
| result in a pass).
| mrweasel wrote:
| Spaghetti piles are where you can do the most... if you're
| brave enough and have agency to do so.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Add some meat sauce and more spaghetti :)
| nico wrote:
| Immutable functions! I guess that's one way of doing
| functional programming /s
| Sharlin wrote:
| In a (very real) sense, git is an immutable data structure
| of immutable snapshots of code.
| windward wrote:
| pfft, that's just symbol versioning
| supportengineer wrote:
| Was this in Blacksburg by any chance?
| jfengel wrote:
| It was indeed! Back in the late 80s. You know of it?
|
| It was so long ago it feels half mythical to me.
| free_bip wrote:
| I once had to deal with some contractors that habitually did
| this, when confronted on how this could lead to confusion they
| said "that's what Ctrl+F is for."
| al_borland wrote:
| I work with someone who has a habit of code duplication like
| this. Typically it's an effort to turn around something quickly
| for someone who is demanding and loud. Refactoring the shared
| function to support the end edge case would take more time and
| testing, so he doesn't do it. This is a symptom of the core
| problem.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| I've been getting stricter about not letting that stuff into
| the codebase. They always say they'll clean it up later but
| they never do.
| Sharlin wrote:
| To paraphrase a Python saying, "master is where bad code
| goes to die".
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| But it's a false premise; the claim is that just copy/pasting
| something is faster, but is it really?
|
| The demanding / loud person can and should be ignored; as a
| developer, you are responsible for code quality and
| maintainability, not your / their manager.
| al_borland wrote:
| I agree. I always take the time to clean things up along
| the way, but short term thinning is often incentivized and
| rewarded.
| anticodon wrote:
| This reminds me of my experience. I've worked for one company
| based in SEA that had almost identical portals in several
| countries in the region. Portals were developed by an
| Australian company and I was hired to maintain existing/develop
| new portals.
|
| Source code for each portal was stored in a separate Git
| repository. I've asked the original authors how am I supposed
| to fix bugs that affect all the portals or develop new
| functionality for all the portals. The answer was to backport
| all fixes manually to all copies of the source code.
|
| Then I've asked: isn't it possible to use a single source
| repository and use feature flags to customize appearance and
| features of each portals. Original authors said that it is
| impossible.
|
| In 2-3 months I've merged the code of 4-5 portals into one
| repository, added feature flags, upgraded the framework
| version, release went flawlessly, and it was possible to fix a
| bug simultaneously for all the portals or develop a new
| functionality available across all the countries where the
| company operated. It was a huge relief for me as copying
| bugfixes manually was tedious and error-prone process.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| This just depresses me. So many programmers back then spent time
| optimising algorithms. Now it's slop city.
| pkaye wrote:
| I've been playing with Claude 4 Sonnet in VS Code and found it
| quite good. As part of the development plan, on its own it had
| included an optimization phase where it profiled my go code,
| identified some hot spots, and proposed ways to optimize it.
| For the most critical area, it suggested using a prefix tree
| which it wrote on the spot, adapted to my code, wrote
| benchmarks to compare the old and new version (5x improvement).
| Then it wrote specific tests to make sure both versions behaved
| the same. Then it made sure all my other tests passed and wrote
| a report on everything.
|
| There were three performance optimizations in total, one which
| I rejected because the gain was minimal for typical use case
| and there are still some memory allocation optimization which I
| have deferred with because I'm in the middle of a major
| refactor of the code. The LLM has already written down plans to
| restart this process later when I more time.
| efnx wrote:
| I'd be wary of doing any but the most obvious optimisations
| without profiling. This goes for humans or AI.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Negative 2000 Lines of Code (1982)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33483165 - Nov 2022 (167
| comments)
|
| _-2000 Lines of Code_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26387179 - March 2021 (256
| comments)
|
| _-2000 Lines of Code_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10734815 - Dec 2015 (131
| comments)
|
| _-2000 lines of code_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7516671 - April 2014 (139
| comments)
|
| _-2000 Lines Of Code_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4040082 - May 2012 (34
| comments)
|
| _-2000 lines of code_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545452 - July 2010 (50
| comments)
|
| _-2000 Lines Of Code_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114223 - Feb 2010 (39
| comments)
|
| _-2000 Lines Of Code (metrics == bad) (1982)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069066 - Jan 2010 (2
| comments)
|
| Note for anyone wondering: reposts are ok after a year or so
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).In addition to it
| being fun to revisit perennials sometimes (though not too often),
| this is also a way for newer cohorts to encounter the classics
| for the first time--an important function of this site!
| j4pe wrote:
| I am a simple man I see -2k lines of code, I upvote
|
| I've told this story to every client who tried schemes to
| benchmark productivity by some single-axis metric. The fact
| that it was Atkinson demonstrates that real productivity is
| only benchmarkable by utility, and if you can get a truly
| accurate quantification for that then you're on the shortlist
| for a Nobel in economics.
| cb321 wrote:
| Important enough to re-state whenever it arises - once you
| have 2 or more axes/dimensions, you no longer have a linear
| ordering. You need to map back to a number line to "compare".
| This is the motivation or driving force toward your "single
| axis". { That doesn't mean it's a goal any easier to realize,
| though. I am attempting to merely clarify/amplify rather than
| dispute here.. }
| Scuds wrote:
| I figured that articles like folklore are like an amusing movie
| file (say someone chopping a skin of a watermelon) that's
| repeatedly being passed around reddit.
| conartist6 wrote:
| I think of this story every time I see a statistic about how much
| LLMs have "increased the productivity" of a developer
| Chris_Newton wrote:
| Or the current industry favourite, " _X_ % of our new code is
| now written by AI!"
| cb321 wrote:
| LOL. There was a time when people were excoriated for
| committing generated object code into version control..
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Microsoft, the number being 30%; whether that's accurate is
| another matter. Twenty years ago people already used IDEs to
| generate boilerplate code (remember Java's
| getters/setters/hashCode/toString?) because some guy in a
| book said you had to.
| thomashop wrote:
| I use AI to simplify code. My manifesto has always been code
| is debt. Works really well too.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Including the cost to build and maintain new nuclear power
| plants takes developers' efficiency into absurdity.
| tuveson wrote:
| Don't be too hard on AI, it can delete code too!
|
| https://forum.cursor.com/t/cursor-yolo-deleted-everything-in...
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I love the way the "Community Ambassador" steps in and offers
| solutions to this problem after it has happened.
| 6510 wrote:
| I often have a mental picture of the thing I need, I start
| writing it, get a bit "stuck" on architecture and think I could
| be using a ready made library for this. I find one or a few of
| them, look at the code (which is obviously more generic) and
| realize it's many times as large as I thought the entire project
| should be. With few exceptions the train of thought doesn't even
| reach the "Do I want to carry this around and baby sit it?"
| stage. Some how this continues to surprise me every time.
|
| These 5 lines are probably my favorite example.
|
| https://jsfiddle.net/gaby_de_wilde/c8bhcatj/7/
| bironran wrote:
| One of my best commits was removing about 60K lines of code, a
| whole "server" (it was early 2000's) with that had to hold all of
| its state in memory and replacing them with about 5k of logic
| that was lightweight enough to piggyback into another service and
| had no in-memory state at all. That was pure a algorithmic win -
| figuring out that a specific guided subgraph isomorphism where
| the target was a tree (directed, non cyclic graph with a single
| root) was possible by a single walk through the origin (general)
| directed bi-graph while emitting vertices and edges to the output
| graph (tree) and maintaining only a small in-process peek-able
| stack of steps taken from the root that can affect the current
| generation step (not necessarily just parent path).
|
| I still remember the behemoth of a commit that was "-60,000 (or
| similar) lines of code". Best commit I ever pushed.
|
| Those were fun times. Hadn't done anything algorithmically
| impressive since.
| ddejohn wrote:
| Sounds interesting. Have you written about it in more detail
| somewhere?
| bbkane wrote:
| What did the software product do?
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Nice when you turn an entire server into a library/executable.
| ifellover wrote:
| I'm a hobby programmer and lucky enough to script a lot of
| things at work. I consider myself fairly adept at some parts of
| programming, but comments like these make it so clear to me
| that I have an absolutely massive universe of unknowns that I'm
| not sure I have enough of a lifetime left to learn about.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Read some good books on data structures and algorithms, and
| you'll be catching up with this sort of comment in no time.
| And then realise there will always be a universe of unknowns
| to you. :-) Good luck, and keep going.
| fuzztester wrote:
| zen comment :)
|
| uncatchable, so I won't even try.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| do try (so you get the joy of 'small' wins), also do know
| that it's untouchable (so you don't despair when you
| don't master quantum mechanics in one lifetime)
|
| :)
| dev0p wrote:
| I've been coding for a living for 10 years and that comment
| threw me for a loop as well. Gotta get to studying some graph
| theory I guess?
| neilv wrote:
| You could've figured out this one with basic familiarity with
| how graphs are represented, constructed, and navigated, and
| just working through it.
|
| One way to often arrive at it is to just draw some graphs, on
| paper/whiteboard, and manually step through examples,
| pointing with your finger/pen, drawing changes, and sometimes
| drawing a table. You'll get a better idea of what has to
| happen, and what the opportunities are.
|
| This sounds "Then draw the rest of the owl," but it can work,
| once you get immersed.
|
| Then code it up. And when you spot a clever opportunity, and
| find the right language to document your solution, it can
| sound like a brilliant insight that you could just pull out
| of the air, because you are so knowledgeable and smart in
| general. When you actually had to work through that specific
| problem, to the point you understood it, like Feynman would
| want you to.
|
| I think Feynman would tell us to work through problems. And
| that Feynman would really f-ing hate Leetcode performance art
| interviews (like he was dismayed when he found students who'd
| rote-memorize the things to say). Don't let Leetcode
| asshattery make you think you're "not good at" algorithms.
| amake wrote:
| (More than?) half of the difficulty comes from the
| vocabulary. It's very much a shibboleth--learn to talk the
| talk and people will assume you are a genius who walks the
| walk.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I want to believe a lot of these algorithms will "come to
| you" if you're ever in a similar situation; only later will
| you learn that they have a name, or there's books written
| about it, etc.
|
| But a lot is opportunity. Like, I had the opportunity to work
| on an old PHP backend, 500ms - 1 second response times
| (thanks in part to it writing everything to a giant XML
| string which was then parsed and converted to a JSON blob
| before being sent back over the line). Simply rewriting it in
| naive / best practices Go changed response times to 10 ms. In
| hindsight the project was far too big to rewrite on my own
| and I should have spent six months to a year trying to
| optimize and refactor it, but, hindsight.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| Hi I'm a mathematician with a background in graph theory and
| algorithms. I'm trying to find a job outside academia. Can you
| elaborate on the kind of work you were doing? Sounds like I
| could fruitfully apply my skills to something like that.
| Cheers!
| hershey890 wrote:
| Look into quantitative analyst roles at finance firms if
| you're that smart.
|
| There's also a role called being an algorithms engineer in
| standard tech companies (typically for lower level work like
| networking, embedded systems, graphics, or embedded systems)
| but the lack of an engineering background may hamstring you
| there. Engineers working in crypto also use a fair bit of
| algorithms knowledge.
|
| I do low level work at a top company, and you only use
| algorithms knowledge on the job a couple of times a year at
| best.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >Those were fun times. Hadn't done anything algorithmically
| impressive since.
|
| the select-a-bunch-of-code-and-then-zap-it-with-the-Del-key is
| the best hardware algorithm.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I guess you're the reason we get asked all those "Invert a
| binary tree" type questions these days!
|
| Jokes aside, could I get a layman's explanation of the graph
| theory stuff here? Sounds pretty cool but the terminology
| escapes me
| chamomeal wrote:
| I would love a little more context on this, cause it sounds
| super interesting and I also have zero clue what you're talking
| about. But translating a stateful program into a stateless one
| sounds like absolute magic that I would love to know about
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| He has two graphs. He wants to determine if one graph is a
| subset of another graph.
|
| The graph that is to be determined as a subset is a tree.
| From there he says it can be done in an algorithm that only
| traverses every node at most one time.
|
| I'm assuming he's also given a starting node in the original
| graph and the algorithm just traverses both graphs at the
| same time starting from the given start node in the original
| graph and the root in the tree to see if they match? Standard
| DFS or BFS works here.
|
| I may be mistaken. Because I don't see any other way to do it
| in one walk through unless you are given a starting node in
| the original graph but I could be mistaken.
|
| To your other point, The algorithm inherently has to also be
| statefull. All traversal algorithms for graphs have to have
| long term state. Simply because if your at a node in a graph
| and it has like 40 paths to other places you can literally
| only go down one path at a time and you have to statefully
| remember that node has another 39 paths that you have to come
| back to later.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| I deleted an entire micro service of task runners and replaced
| it with a library that uses setTimeout as the primitive driving
| tasks from our main server.
|
| It's because every task was doing a database call but they had
| a whole repo and aws lambdas for running it. Stupidest thing
| I've ever seen.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| The target being a tree is irrelevant right? It's the "guided"
| part that makes a single walk through possible?
|
| You are starting at a specific node in the graph and saying
| that if there's an isomorphism the target tree root node must
| be equivalent to that specific starting node in the original
| graph.
|
| You just walk through the original graph following the pattern
| of the target tree and if something doesn't match it's false
| otherwise true? Am I mistaken here? Again the target being a
| tree is a bit irrelevant. This will work for any subgraph as
| long as as you are also given starting point nodes for both the
| target and the original graph?
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Am I mistaken? Is what you say even possible?
|
| Given two graphs one is a tree you cannot determine if the tree
| is a subgraph of the other graph in one walk through?
|
| It's only possible if you're given additional information? Like
| a starting node to search from? I'm genuinely confused?
| vodou wrote:
| A long time ago I was working in a big project where the PLs came
| up with the most horrible metric I've ever seen. They made a big
| handwritten list, visible for the whole team, where they marked
| for each individual developer how many bugs they had fixed and
| how many bugs they had caused.
|
| I couldn't believe my eyes. I was working in my own project
| beside this team with the list, so thankfully I was left out of
| the whole disaster.
|
| A guy I knew wasn't that lucky. I saw how he suffered from this
| harmful list. Then I told him a story about the Danish film
| director Lars von Trier I recently had heard. von Trier was going
| to be chosen to appear in a "canon" list of important Danish
| artists that the goverment was responsible for. He then made a
| short film where he took the Danish flag (red with a white cross)
| and cut out the white lines and stitched it together again,
| forming a red communist flag. von Trier was immediately made
| persona non grata and removed from the "canon".
|
| Later that day my friend approached the bugs caused/fixed list,
| cut out his own line, taped it together and put it on the wall
| again. I never forget how a PL came in the room later, stood and
| gazed at the list for a long time before he realized what had
| happened. "Did you do this?" he asked my friend. "Yes", he
| answered. "Why?", said the PL. "I don't want to be part of that
| list", he answered. The next day the list was gone.
|
| A dear memory of successful subversion.
| fathomdeez wrote:
| I'm having a lot of trouble visualizing both the flag and the
| list modifications.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| The danish flag is a white cross on a red background. If you
| cut out the white cross, you will be left with four
| rectangles of red, which can be pushed together and sewn up
| again, forming a solid red flag
| bombcar wrote:
| Took me two reads but he cut his line out of the list, taped
| it back together and replaced the list on the wall, without
| his line.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > "I don't want to be part of that list"
|
| Simple, to the point, love it. "I'm not playing your stupid
| management games".
| kunley wrote:
| "Every line of code not written is a correct one".
|
| One of the early Ruby Koans, IIRC, circulated on comp.lang.ruby
| around 2002
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Should have said "Every line of Ruby code not written is a
| correct one"
| kunley wrote:
| I nominate Java for that particular category
| charcircuit wrote:
| Just because lines of code is being reported it didn't mean that
| bigger automatically means better. It does tell a story about how
| one is spending their time though.
| abraxas wrote:
| An old Dilbert cartoon had the pointy haired boss declare
| monetary rewards for every fixed bug in their product. Wally went
| back to his desk murmuring "today I'm going to code me a
| minivan!"
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/tyXXh1d.png
|
| My manager has it pinned on the breakroom wall.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Sorry what's the minivan reference?
| angus-g wrote:
| I assume a cycle of write bug -> fix bug -> get paid until
| they can afford a new car!
| amoshebb wrote:
| it's just a stand-in for "expensive but relatable purchase".
| He's saying "I'm about to write so many bugs that the sum
| reward will be in the tens of thousands"
| windward wrote:
| It's also foolish. Any true PHB has caps on bonuses linked
| to output that would be too low to enable a minivan.
| bombcar wrote:
| It would have been a sports car but Wally's not the type.
| mojo74 wrote:
| The Perverse incentive:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
| Arch-TK wrote:
| I am currently working on a piece of code which I am actively
| trying to simplify and make smaller. It's not a piece of code
| which has any business ever getting larger or having more
| features. The design is such that it is feature complete until a
| whole system redesign is required at which point the code would
| be itself wholesale replaced. So I am sitting here trying to
| codegolf the code down in complexity and size. It's not just
| important to keep it simple, it's also important to keep it small
| as this bit of code is, as part of this solution, going to be
| executed using python -c. All the while not taking the piss and
| making it unreadable (I can use a minifier for that).
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Just today I commited a +0-2kLOC change, removing two months of
| my coworker's contribution, because it had to be rewritten. Best
| feeling ever.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Adding that code was not a waste even. You don't have to work
| every line of code like a mule. Code ...is... thinking.
| jaydeegee wrote:
| In an old ops role we had a metric called ticket touches. One of
| my workmates had almost double of everyone else but only for that
| metric. We had a look and it was due to how he wrote notes in
| tickets instead of putting all his findings in a comment he would
| do it incrementally as he went along. Neither of these ways were
| wrong it just inflated that stat for him.
| fathomdeez wrote:
| I am net negative in lines of code added to two different
| companies I've worked for. I wear that proudly.
| runfaster2000 wrote:
| This is a good example[1] at 64k LOC removal. We removed built-in
| support for C# + WinRT interop on Windows and instead required
| users to use a source-generation tool (which is still the case
| today). This was a breaking change. We realized we had one chance
| to do this and took it.
|
| [1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/36715/files
| mapmeld wrote:
| Before a recent annual performance review, I looked over my stats
| in the company monolith repo and found out I was net-negative on
| lines of code. That comes mostly from removing auto-generated API
| code and types (the company had moved to a new API and one of my
| projects was removing v1) but it was quite funny to think about
| going to work every day to erase code.
| mindesc wrote:
| This is how you turn unwanted dependencies and inability to make
| string searches a virtue.
| strathmeyer wrote:
| A manager asking you to tell them how many lines of code you
| wrote is peak middle-management. Like what are you even doing,
| you count them.
| klntsky wrote:
| A more realistic end of the story would be that the form refused
| negative numbers so he had to put 0 and got fired.
| djfivyvusn wrote:
| Got laid off recently due to basically this.
| eCa wrote:
| This being 1982 I've never even considered that the form could
| be anything but paper.
| JdeBP wrote:
| It being 1982 and a story about the lead developer of
| LisaGraf, working on that very thing, it is certainly
| unlikely to be a GUI form.
|
| But block mode terminals that did forms had been a thing for
| over a decade at that point. Not that this was likely at
| Apple. But there are definitely contemporary ways in which
| one could have been entering this stuff via a computer.
|
| Indeed, an IBM 3270 could be told that a field was numeric.
| This wouldn't have the terminal prevent negative numbers. The
| host would have to have done that upon ENTER. But the idea of
| unsigned numbers in form data had been around in (say) COBOL
| PIC strings since the 1960s.
|
| * https://ibm.com/docs/en/cics-
| ts/5.6.0?topic=terminals-3270-f...
| mavhc wrote:
| He put in -2000, and it recorded it as 4294965296
| meepmorp wrote:
| in 1982, I'd expect 63536
| zkmon wrote:
| Great collection of stories! Thanks for sharing. I got carried
| away across the pages and relished the quotes page.
|
| The ideals probably worked for that time and that place. Many
| places in other parts of the world and at other times, would have
| different ideals, to deal with different priorities at that time
| and place. America in the 80's had no survival struggle, wars,
| cultural stigmas, pandemics or famines. Literacy and business
| were blooming. Great minds and workers were lured with great
| promises. A natural result is accelerated innovation. Plenty of
| food and materials. Individualism, fun and luxury was the goal
| for most. The businesses delivered all of it. Personal computing
| was an exact fit for that business.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Some theories will cause you have a negative performance review
| and will be fired haha
| kookamamie wrote:
| Lines of code is a byproduct, not the goal.
|
| Code is an artifact, undesired debris.
|
| The fewer lines, the better.
| Koffiepoeder wrote:
| Well, like everything it's probably a balance to strike.
| Otherwise you may end up with highly golfed IOCCC-style code in
| production, which I would definitely not recommend.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I've seen advent of code one-liners, and sometimes more lines
| is better than a one-liner.
| kookamamie wrote:
| Yes, my thinking here isn't about the semantics of code,
| whether it is written in dense or terse form, but about the
| more meta level - code itself is something we write to
| achieve some goal, it shouldn't be the goal by itself. As an
| example, as a company is audited for their valuation, it is
| not the code amount itself that is valuable. In many ways it
| can be seen as a burden, as you'll need to maintain code over
| time.
| rottc0dd wrote:
| Hi,
|
| I think I have mentioned this before in HN too. I am not from CS
| background and just learnt the trade as I was doing the job, I
| mean even the normal stuff.
|
| We have a project that tries reify live objects into human
| readable form. Final representation is so complicated with lot of
| types and the initial representation is less complicated.
|
| In order to make it readable, if there is any common or similar
| data nodes, we have to compare and try to combine them i.e. find
| places that can be made into methods and find the relevant
| arguments for all the calls (kind of).
|
| Initial implementation did the transformation into the final form
| first, and then started the comparison. So, the comparison have
| to deal with all the different combinations of the types we have
| in final representation now, which made the whole thing so
| complex and has been maintained by generation of engineers that
| nobody had clear idea how it was working.
|
| Then, I read about hashmap implementation later (yep, I am that
| dumb) and it was a revelation. So, we did following things:
|
| 1. We created a hash for skeleton that has to remain the same
| through all the set of comparisons and transformation of the
| "common nodes", (it can be considered as something similar to
| methods or arguments) and doing the comparison for nodes with
| matching skeletal hashes and
|
| 2. created a separate layer that does the comparison and creating
| common nodes on initial primitive form and then doing the
| transformation as the second layer (so you don't have to deal
| with all types in final representation) and
|
| 3. Don't type. Yes. Data is simplest abstraction and if your
| logic can made into data or some properties, please do yourself a
| favor and make them so. We found lot of places, where weird class
| hierarchies can be converted into data properties.
|
| Basically, it is a dumb multi pass decompiler.
|
| That did not just speed up the process, but resulted in much more
| readable and understandable abstractions and code. I do not know,
| if this is widely useful but it helped in one project. There is
| no silver bullet, but types were actual problem for us and so we
| solved it this way.
| dgan wrote:
| yesterday I deleted 2500 lines out of a project of 4300 lines
| lol.
|
| I have mixed feelings because now it's so much simpler, but the
| frustration of having to write these lines in the first place,
| it's so annoying. that's what happens when specs aren't clear
| rossant wrote:
| I think lines of code could be an interesting and valuable
| metric.
|
| If the lower (negative) score, the better (given a fixed set of
| features).
|
| "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add,
| but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de
| Saint-Exupery, Airman's Odyssey
| entuno wrote:
| That just encourages bad behaviour in the other direction
| though. A massive multi-level nested ternary on one line is
| usually going to be worse than a longer but clearer set of
| conditions. Trying to make code brief _can_ be good, but it can
| often result in an unmaintainable and hard to read mess.
| windward wrote:
| That results in the same AST, it's not really taking anything
| away
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| You'll never get it right though. Focusing on "features per
| LOC" means people will write shorthand, convoluted code, pick
| obscure, compact languages, etc. To use an adage, if a metric
| becomes a target, it stops being a useful metric.
| sixthDot wrote:
| Halstead complexity ([0]) might interest you. It's a semi-
| secret sauce based on the count of operators and operands that
| tells you if your function is "shitty".
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halstead_complexity_measures
| kaoD wrote:
| Code is not an asset, it's a liability.
| impostervt wrote:
| About 1.5 years ago I inherited a project with ~ 250,000 lines of
| code - in just the web UI (not counting back end).
|
| The developer who wrote it was a smart guy, but he had never
| worked on any other JS project. All state was stored in the DOM
| in custom attributes, .addEventListeners EVERYWHERE... I joke
| that it was as if you took a monk, gave him a book about
| javascript, and then locked him in a cell for 10 years.
|
| I started refactoring pieces into web components, and after about
| 6 months had removed 50k lines of code. Now knowing enough about
| the app, I started a complete rewrite. The rewrite is about 80%
| feature parity, and is around 17k lines of code (not counting
| libraries like Vue/pinia/etc).
|
| So, soon, I shall have removed over 200,000 loc from the project.
| I feel like then I should retire as I will never top that.
| motorest wrote:
| > The rewrite is about 80% feature parity, and is around 17k
| lines of code (not counting libraries like Vue/pinia/etc).
|
| This is exactly where these comparisons break down. Obviously
| you don't need as much code to get passable implementations of
| a fraction of all the features.
| sshine wrote:
| >> _is about 80% feature parity, and is around 17k lines of
| code_
|
| You make a fair point that a basic framework can be expressed
| with much less code.
|
| And that the remaining 20% probably contains more edge cases
| with proportionally more code.
|
| But do you think the last 20% will eventually make up
| anywhere near 233k lines of code?
|
| The real save here comes from rewriting: seeing all the
| common denominators and knowing what's ahead.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| It's definitely a good argument for not reinventing the wheel
| though.
|
| I'd rather have 250,000 lines of code but 230,000 of that is
| in battle tested libraries. And of which only 20,000 lines
| are what we ever need to read/write.
| williamdclt wrote:
| I mean, you can get basic implementations of Vue and state
| management libs in a few hundred (maybe thousand?) LOCs (lots
| of examples on the interweb) that are probably less "toyish"
| than whatever this person had handrolled
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > I joke that it was as if you took a monk, gave him a book
| about javascript, and then locked him in a cell for 10 years.
|
| I've had a similar experience (see other comment), the original
| author was a junior developer at best, but unfortunately, a
| middle-aged, experienced developer, one of the founders of the
| company, and very productive. But obviously, not someone who
| had ever worked in a team or who had someone else work on their
| codebase.
|
| Think functions thousands of lines long, nested
| switch/case/if/else/ternary things ten levels deep,
| concatenated SQL queries (it was PHP because of course),
| concatenated JS/HTML/HTML-with-JS (it was Dojo front-end), no
| automated tests of any sort, etc.
| justtinker wrote:
| In the days when perl was the language of choice for the web I
| got a 97% reduction in code size. I was asked to join a late
| project to speed it up. (Yes I know that has low success rate).
|
| The lead dev was a hard core c programmer and had no perl
| experience before this job. He handed me a 200 line uncommented
| function that he wrote and was not working. It was a pattern
| matcher. I replaced it with 6 lines of commented perl with regex
| that was very readable (for a regex).
|
| Since he had no idiomatic understanding of perl he did not accept
| it and complained to management. We had to bring in the local
| perl demigod to arbitrate(at 21 was half my age at the time, but
| smart as a whip). Ruled in my favor and the lead was pissed.
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