At my last job we had a few bash scripts like those. They could have used a bash loop, but one of the developers wasn’t good with Bash, so he took to himself to rewrite using a handmade javascript framework.
It was quite complete and very smart, with lots of OOP patterns and wrappers abound. But it was not only impossible to understand, it was almost impossible to debug too, because of the amount of indirection.
Big balls of mud often also appear because people actually say “hey maybe we should…” but but still manage to miss the mark.
As much as I would love to give some insightful comment here, I can’t. To paraphrase a post I saw here about Casey Muratori: sometimes the only advice you can give to someone is to “get good”. Putting in the 10000 hours and getting actual feedback rather than pretending that the bullshit you wrote is good because the previous one was understandable by a non-techie.
>It was quite complete and very smart, with lots of OOP patterns and wrappers abound. But it was not only impossible to understand, it was almost impossible to debug too, because of the amount of indirection.
I've seen this SO MANY times too.
Nothing like having 8 files open to debug what turns out to be a one line change due to all of the object inheritance.
Someone once had me code review a 2500 line bash script, written like a Cobol program, but with no error checking of anything. I'm not sure what my point is, but sometimes I am surprised civilization still works as well as it does.
It was quite complete and very smart, with lots of OOP patterns and wrappers abound. But it was not only impossible to understand, it was almost impossible to debug too, because of the amount of indirection.
Big balls of mud often also appear because people actually say “hey maybe we should…” but but still manage to miss the mark.
As much as I would love to give some insightful comment here, I can’t. To paraphrase a post I saw here about Casey Muratori: sometimes the only advice you can give to someone is to “get good”. Putting in the 10000 hours and getting actual feedback rather than pretending that the bullshit you wrote is good because the previous one was understandable by a non-techie.