Even worse than there being no comments: the code is extensively commented, but its function has drifted from what the comments describe to the point where they are actively misleading.
I was part of project that scoffed at the idea documenting code. Comments were also few and far between. In retrospective, it really seemed like they wanted to give that elitist feel because everything reeked of wanting to keep things under wraps despite everything being done out in the freakin’ open.
You got 3 letters?! Luck!
I worked at a japanese company whose engineers we’re former NTT developers. Copypasta (i.e. not using functions), inefficient algos, single-letter var names, remote code execution from code as root, etc. good times!
ARGH this triggered a bit of PTSD for me…
“We’re going to convert these COBOL applications to C#, and you need to test that the new application works exactly the same, including the same bugs as the old application.”
“Ok, where’s the specifications and test reports of the old COBOL applications?”
“They were lost to time, we don’t know where they are.”
“Ok, so how are the developers going to write the C# code?”
“They’re going to read the COBOL scripts and recreate them into C#, we advise you do the same.”Cue me spending a month trying to decypher the COBOL gobbledigook into inputs and outputs, and write testcases based on that. And after that month was up, and I had delivered my testcases, they told me that my services were no longer needed.
The language is COBOL.
your paycheck is $5000 because you know COBOL
Pretty sure that knowing COBOL isn’t the hard part. It has relatively few language concepts.
This lack of language concepts just makes it difficult to reason about it, so that’s what you’re getting a paycheck for. Well, and possibly also because it might take months to have a new dev figure out your legacy codebase, so it’s cheaper to keep the current dev by paying them competitive prices.
Per day.
Hey! This was my first real job. Is Matlab code written by physicists who just recently learned programming.
That’s what agentic AI is for! Your OS will figure out by itself what you are doing and weave together a shambolic rococo digital house of cards that will be not just undocumented but utterly incomprehensible.
It’s fine, just get a 5GHz CPU with 48 cores, 1TB of DDR5 HBM super RAM, and maybe a few petabytes of storage (in the cloud in a flatpack Docker that runs on a VM), so that you can finally make that button blue.
Shut up and take my venture capital money! And maybe 2/3 of the whole market cap in stock options! /s
Fucken right, get your agentic AI to get in touch with my agentic AI (with wire transfer deets)
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Something that I’m disproportionately proud of is that my contributions to open source software are a few minor documentation improvements. One of those times, the docs were wrong and it took me ages to figure out how to do the thing I was trying to do. After I solved it, I was annoyed at the documentation being wrong, and fixed it before submitting a pull request.
I’ve not yet made any code contributions to open source, but there have been a few people on Lemmy who helped me to realise I shouldn’t diminish my contribution because good documentation is essential, but often neglected.
The fact that documentation and comments can’t “fail” if the underlying code changes is a real problem. I’ve even worked at places which dictated that comments had to go directly above or even beside (inline) with the code they were explaining, so they would show up in any patches changing the code.
What do you think happened? Yup, people would change code and leave the outdated (and wrong) comment untouched, directly to the right of the code they just changed.
Hell, I was one of those people, so I get how it can happen.
I’ll get shit on for suggesting it but this is a great use case for AI: comment the code and generate some basic docs. Even if it’s wrong it’ll give you a sense of where to start looking for flows.
Oh, it’s only the files that have over 2k lines of code? Hell, I’ll take that over what I’m dealing with now. I’ve got multiple FUNCTIONS that are over 2k lines. >:(
I didn’t even know we were hiring …
The only experience I have like this is when I wanted to see how the ARMA Life mod was doing certain things, but it was programmed by like 20 different people in 3 different languages. Most of it was in German and French.
It was easier to just to find my own way of doing what I wanted to do.
Well, I’m the only maintainer for my project, so ha! (I only have myself to blame.)
That just means my boss will have to do all the work. Ha, what an idiot. Wait… aw. 🙁
Those are rookie numbers. We got functions with 5000+ lines and 20 levels of indentation directly in the user-interaction event handlers :)
“Code IS documentation”
