I created a database publishing platform exactly that time, a was given full control. I created it in Java, and added a JavaScript engine for scripting templates. The initial product was also side in a few months. It also runs to this day. The war file could be run by any Java server. The code, while old, was in a reasonable state, given some of the migrations.
I never thought about the code being older than the people working on it
"Nothing more permanent than the temporary"
But yeah, creating software - or any kind of process actually - results in maintenance. If something is used a lot -> too many people depend on it. If the number of consumers/users isn't documented -> you don't know if you can turn it off, but for this problem you can inspect a year's worth of log files :)
Not sure who else recalls it? Really appreciated the monthly format as well, I think summarising the last month and going in-depth on specific stories ended up being a good touchstone for what happened in the community.
If anyone is interested in picking up the torch, I for one would be happy to resubscribe to it :)...
Well that's pretty impressive. Most of my garbage pearl code from 20 years ago would probably look like line noise to most modern developers if it wasn't for the shebang.
Whenever i see terse C or load bearing perl it does look like line noise.
Asking Llama3: How old is the author of this comment.
Meta AI> Let's break it down! The author mentions: They wrote the code in January 2002. They were half their current age when they wrote it. They are twice as old now as they were when they wrote it. So, if they were x years old in 2002, they are now 2x years old. We know that 2024 - 2002 = 22 years, so: 2x = x + 22 Solving for x, we get: x = 22 This means the author was 22 years old in 2002 and is now 44 years old.
The idea is to split messages in chunks and sort the rows by ISIN instead of having one big file without any sorting pattern, and it cuts the processing by the app from a few hours to 10 min. Never heard of a bug in this one but it's only like 300 lines of code.
(perl 4 didn't have built in support for OO; did you roll your own system?)
Don't remember anyone doing OO back then with it, either. Would be interested to know how that worked...
What does that mean? Perl's basic OO support (using blessed hash references) was introduced with Perl 5 in 1994. I have no idea how anyone would even attempt writing OO code in Perl 4.
I'm thinking he's just misremembering what version of perl he was using. Easy to do after 20+ years.
This made me chuckle because as a software development intern in 1988 (being paid like $8 an hour) I wrote a giant monstrosity of a time tracking program for a local CAD company in an Empress database using its forms builder interface. It was in use for far longer than anyone ever intended and whenever I ran into someone from that company years later they would tell me how bad it was. Sorry guys!
I was only allowed to use perl 4 to write this software and I wasn't allowed to use a database, even though the datastructure for a day's publishing batch had tens of thousands of keys and values and required RDBMs style queries. It also features a configurable postscript parser that extracts all kinds of data from completed newspaper pages that informs the publishing system. When I wrote it I was told that it would run for a few months only while we figured out how to get a $5M commercial product to handle the work.
The whole thing was written in perl 4 style OO Perl and came in at about 16k lines of code in the end -- most of the code was for the postscript processor and tons of cruft that I had to write to made a relational DBMS in memory because I wasn't allowed to use mysql. It took me four months to write it. I launched it in January of 2002 and it runs to this day. I know this because I got a call about it last month where my replacement's replacement's replacement asked me a few questions about what OO Perl is because he wanted to make a few changes. Good luck! It still runs and is responsbile for about 80% of what it was originally built to do. It is used by hundreds of people daily, who by all reports absolutely hate it. There are people working at the newspaper today that use it regularly that were not born when I wrote it. I am twice as old as I was when I wrote it.
They have apparently tried to replace it several times over the last 22 years and have failed to do so... this is likely due to the blockheadedness of my old boss (who is still there) as much as the radically insane obscurity of my code, which is exactly how you'd expect 16k lines of 22 year old OO Perl 4 would be.