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A comment on Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by api on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:02AM (#18450291)
Code like this makes me think of the famous line from the film version of Hellraiser: "I have such sights to show you..."

Contrast PostgreSQL or... uhh... virtually any other database. Oracle's mess is clearly a result of bad management, not a reflection of the intrinsic difficulty of the problem domain.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by ternaryoperator on Thursday November 15, 2018 @12:53AM (#18457175)
Nonsense. The problem domain you dismiss is hideously complicated. Oracle DB and PostgreSQL are entirely different classes of products. No airline runs its reservation system on PostreSQL. That's not a coincidence.
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Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by meshugga on Thursday November 15, 2018 @05:26AM (#18458216)
It's not a coincidence, no, because Oracle can provide support guarantees in a way a Postgres contractor can not.

This is also a factor for independent developers (who build airline reservation systems) who need to choose a RDBMS for their product - they'll choose oracle, because ... Oracle can provide support guarantees in a way a Postgres contractor can not.

Which makes Oracle not a different class of product than Postgres, but a different class of support for the product. (which could be considered part of the product, so ... maybe you're right)

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Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by TheHaakon on Friday November 23, 2018 @05:03AM (#18515530)
No, they use Amadeus. Amadeus is a wonderful mainframe program that perfectly and with 100% accuracy faithfully models how you'd book a train ticket in France in the fifties.

What more could we want?

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Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by p0nce on Thursday November 15, 2018 @09:16AM (#18459350)
> The problem domain you dismiss is hideously complicated.

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-biggest-codebases-in-his...

Size of software reflects the number of people working on it (and for how long), not essential complexity.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by rv77ax on Thursday November 15, 2018 @05:35PM (#18464121)
Have you heard the term "marketing"?
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Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by mdavid626 on Thursday November 15, 2018 @09:50AM (#18459612)
This is interesting, could you elaborate?
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Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by castathrowaway on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @11:14PM (#18456808)
The KDB+ database has been around for 20 years.

The executable is ~ 500kb.

Enterprise software is gross.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by majewsky on Thursday November 15, 2018 @07:16AM (#18458624)
> The executable is ~ 500kb.

So... is this good or bad? A Hello World in Go is on the order of 2 MB. That doesn't say anything about code bloat, it just says that Go prefers static over dynamic linking.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by castathrowaway on Sunday November 18, 2018 @11:02PM (#18484147)
That 2 MB might be messier than you suggest. It seems like people close to the project spent time trying to clean it up:

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6853

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