this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Programmer Humor

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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.

  1. They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.

  2. 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.

  3. This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.

  4. 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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[โ€“] felbane@lemmy.world 3 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours 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.

[โ€“] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 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