Re:Fear and Loathing in APL (2015)
by nickpeterson on Sunday March 04, 2018 @08:26PM
(#16518016)
I would love more particulars about this.
What were the two other worse applications?
The worst, as a piece of code, was a Byzantine C++ application. It had been written with abstractions and indirections to cater for every conceivable eventuality. And it seemed to incubate Heisenbugs.
Usually, with a C++ app you can fix it incrementally but we tried and it was just impossible. Far too intertwined. In the end I wrote a replacement from scratch.
The other one was a Smalltalk system. Actually, pretty well written and documented. But once Smalltalk gets above a certain size it can become impossible to reason about. And it’s very hard to replace parts. Sadly, this one was a failure. It never got fixed or replaced. Just went out of business.
I’ve worked on a lot of systems and a fair few languages in my time. I’d rank it as the 3rd worst application I’ve ever dealt with.
It’s also one of the few where I didn’t end up with a grudging admiration for the original developers. And I’ve replaced a “real time” event based system written in Sybase stored procs so I have a really low threshold.