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1. Chris 🌱 (brainblasted@jade.moe)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 03:03:12 UTC Chris 🌱

   Have you ever seen source code that makes you go "nevermind, I'm not touching this"?

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   • brennen (brennen@federation.p1k3.com)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 09:16:46 UTC brennen

     in reply to

     • Blake C. Stacey

     @bstacey @brainblasted big same, although somewhat cyclically since i deploy wikipedia for a living

   • brennen (brennen@federation.p1k3.com)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 09:16:46 UTC brennen

     in reply to

     • Blake C. Stacey

     @bstacey @brainblasted (mediawiki is hard to reason about, especially when you add a lot of traffic to the mix - or at least the parts i have to figure out who to beg for help with after they break in production are hard to reason about.

     that said, it's also built by a lot of smart & experienced people, and it's not the kind of doomed, eldritch horror i used to encounter taking one-off craigslist webdev jobs or working on haphazard forks of early 2000s e-commerce platforms.)

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   • Blake C. Stacey (bstacey@icosahedron.website)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 09:16:51 UTC Blake C. Stacey

     in reply to

     @brainblasted Yes. MediaWiki.

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 09:17:03 UTC Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     @brainblasted Probably X11, just looking at it's documentation. Wayland's much MUCH better!

     Compilers like GCC, JavaScriptCore, GHC, or LLVM.

     Linux is an interesting case: all it's subcomponents are largely but not entirely self-contained, which makes it a little more bearable.

     Oh, and seeing WebKit's and Gecko's code chased me into writing an alternative!

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   • Andrew (bookseller era) (ajroach42@retro.social)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 09:31:25 UTC Andrew (bookseller era)

     in reply to

     @brainblasted The system that powers my dayjob's production systems is very much "Nevermind I'm not touching this" code.

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   • brennen (brennen@federation.p1k3.com)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 18:08:06 UTC brennen

     in reply to

     • Kunal Mehta

     @legoktm yeah. i'm not sure if anything is too important to care about code quality, exactly, but above some baseline threshold of possible-to-improve, maybe code quality usually isn't really the problem except in a narrow mechanical sense, much the same way that language choice is rarely the real problem.[0]

     a heretical thesis i should probably explore more.

     (of course, the "narrow mechanical sense" makes up most of my job, but still.)

     [0]. https://p1k3.com/2014/9/6/

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   • Kunal Mehta (legoktm@mastodon.technology)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 18:08:08 UTC Kunal Mehta

     in reply to

     • Blake C. Stacey
     • brennen
     • Daniel Glus

     @danielhglus @brennen @bstacey @brainblasted shrug, MediaWiki's impact on the world is too great to care about code quality tbh, it certainly has its warts, but at least we can slowly make it better.

   • Daniel Glus (danielhglus@mastodon.technology)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 18:08:11 UTC Daniel Glus

     in reply to

     • Blake C. Stacey
     • brennen
     • Kunal Mehta

     @brennen @bstacey @brainblasted *hands microphone to @legoktm *

   • Kunal Mehta (legoktm@mastodon.technology)'s status on Monday, 10-Jan-2022 21:45:34 UTC Kunal Mehta

     in reply to

     • brennen

     @brennen jumping off the Rust bandwagon for a second, I totally agree with your take on language choice. Your post reminds me of what someone from Etsy said (paraphrased, possibly misremembered) at one of the Wikimedia dev summits: People only pick PHP when they're accidentally going to change the world c.f. Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress.

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