I'll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.

They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.
The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.
This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.
Here's my favorite part. You obviously don't want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you're thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.

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[–] GottaHaveFaith@fedia.io 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I basically fix other people shitty voice for a living (replacing it with my own shitty code), the "best" one was by a guy, I suppose he was a self taught c programmer from how he wrote code, writing a complex python program. I saw:

a function called randomNumberGenerator. It was a function which started a webserver. While looking for a python tutorial for something I found out why: he copy pasted the tutorial snippet but then didn't bother renaming the function
a program whose job was to listen to all other services and send them to another service via udp BUT it had a maximum buffer size so messages sometimes got truncated. I just directly put the listener in the target program and deleted it
like another guy in this thread he didn't use git. First day on the job they told me "yes, we need to check which machine has the latest code because he ssh into them and work there". His version control was basically putting code in different machines
lot of copied variables, because of c I suppose? Things like var = self.var
camelCase python (ok this is just styling in the end)
files with 10k lines of code
half the services were in python 2, half in python 3. Don't ask me why
variables name in his original language (not English, not the client language)
single letter variables, I fondly remember self.I (upper case i)
I remember an if a == a: (I left it there because lol)
he added a license check which used the ethernet mac address. Too bad ethernet was removed from the machine, and his code launched an exception which returned 00:00:00:00 as mac address, so all licenses were working on all machines

And many other things...

In another project I saw a backend running on the frontend, as in, this guy wrote the logic for a machine on the Javascript running the user interface of the screen

[–] AckPhttt@beehaw.org 3 points 1 day ago

lot of copied variables, because of c I suppose? Things like var = self.var

If we're very charitable, there's a micro-optimization w/ Python (or at least, older Python) where assigning to a local variable like this inside a method is faster than the full self.var lookup, so you'll see it in Python's library code while setting up some loops, etc. as a small speedup. "lots of copied variables", though, is likely an anti-pattern if not in a heavily used piece of library code, imo.

What's really crazy is when people write modified Python language pre-processors where: var = var is a necessary thing (to bring the var into the right context for the pre-processor to recognize it; yes, I've seen this...)

[–] felbane@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

files with 10k lines of code

oh my sweet summer child.

I was once charged with maintaining an application with a median line count of 40k. The largest file was 87kLOC with 2nd place going to a 69kLOC (nice) file filled with interwoven C and inline assembly. My favorite was a 51kLOC file with a 32,621 line function.

Miracle I didn't develop alcoholism during that job.

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Pretty sure there was one over 100k file at one of my old workplaces. It kept growing and growing and was the most critical file in the business. Like if that file suddenly vanished, the business would be done or shut down for at least a year, maybe two kinda thing. Re-certifying the output of that file would probably take 6 months alone.

It had a partner file, also very important, but not as, which was much smaller around 20k-25k