News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Every app has a scary basement—dark old mysterious code v... by hysterix on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @02:57PM (#1669743)
"When I was first exposed to this reality, some friends on the nearby Microsoft Word team shared stories about their app's own scary basement: a routine called FormatLine. Given a point in a document and a column width, FormatLine would lay out the next line of text at that point. As I heard it, this routine had evolved into a handful of functions that were each thousands of lines long. Developers assigned to descend into the depths of FormatLine were treated with the same respect and concern as spelunkers attempting to reach trapped miners."

This paragraph is hilarious and horrifying all rolled into one. That is not my idea of a fun project.

Re:Every app has a scary basement—dark old mysterious code v... by city41 on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @03:57PM (#1669918)
I had a friend who was on the Excel team, he told me similar horror stories about some of the very old code that is still in Excel to this day and about as unmaintainable as can be.