💾 Archived View for freeshell.de › gemlog › 2021-10-05.gmi captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:38:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Legacy code, you say? ⌨️

Once I worked on pension calculations. I was the nth dev to work on the code. The original dev no. 1 had done a pretty good job of translating pseudo-code written by actuaries into understandable source code. It took an age to compile. About half way through the build it always spat out the message

Remove me when you feel brave

Dev n-1 was still around so I asked him about the message. He told me to look at the comments in the code. There it said something like...

// I'm pretty sure that this number had already been calculated
// so we shouldn't need to do it here, but I'm not sure, so...
#pragma message( "Remove me when you feel brave" )

I looked through the code and agreed with the comment. The number should have been calculated, but I wasn't sure. So I wasn't brave.

I wonder if anyone ever was brave?

This was long enough ago that there *should* have been multiple re-writes, but there's a chance it still spits out that message at an Indian outsource dev who isn't paid anywhere near enough for bravery.

Now that was a case where we had one source repo and a clear spec. Sadly I now maintain code in dozens of repos, and all information about how they work is in people's heads. I found some code today with fairly broken use of generics that could cause casting problems. But it has been that way since 2013, and fixing it would mean changes to... this, which might break... that. So I left it.

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