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-2000 Lines of code

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499 points xeonmc | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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jfengel ◴[] No.44382104[source]
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.

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uticus ◴[] No.44382155[source]
> 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.

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0cf8612b2e1e ◴[] No.44382661[source]
I mean…when you have a pile of spaghetti, there is only so much you can do.
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1. sumtechguy ◴[] No.44386821{3}[source]
Add some meat sauce and more spaghetti :)