Conversation with #inferno at Sat Apr  3 13:07:55 2010 on powerman-asdf@irc.freenode.net (irc)
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(17:22:46) powerman: uriel: maybe you can help me... i'm writing some article about complexity, and wanna include some nice examples
(17:23:49) powerman: i remember i've seen some funny places in linux kernel, commented like '199x - if anybody will be able to understand this part of code - fix this and that'
(17:23:57) powerman: sort of
(17:24:33) powerman: but i'm unable to find these now :(
(17:26:49) powerman: any other good example of overcomplicated things which nobody can understand anymore including their authors are ok too
(18:26:42) uriel: powerman-asdf: perl regexp engine
(18:27:20) uriel: I heard a talk by one of the perl developers, saying that only three people understood it, one quit, the other was recoving, and he wasn't sure if he understood it anymore
(18:27:46) uriel: but usually developers are not so honest
(18:28:12) uriel: ah, another example comes to mind: BSD's VFS, which quoting theo: "people have been trying to fix for twenty years, and they have made no progress"
(18:28:19) uriel: (or something to that effect)
(18:29:09) uriel: if you just want examples of mind-numbing-worthless complexity, there are plenty of those everywhere
(18:29:25) uriel: Subversion is one of my favorites, as an example of how to do everything wrong,
(18:29:39) uriel: more complex design, more complex code, and much less usefulness than hg/git
(18:29:51) uriel: (and much slower, and much more unreilable, etc., etc)
(18:30:36) uriel: another specific code that nobody really understands anymore is the tty code in the linux kernel, that Alan Cox and others have been trying to fix for many years
(18:32:17) powerman: yeah, that comment I remember is probably was from Cox
(18:32:42) uriel: another more general example (which IMHO illustrates the wider problem better) is Solaris
(18:32:44) powerman: but I can't find prooflinks. google code search trying to hide the truth :)
(18:32:47) uriel: I was talking with one of the dtrace folks
(18:33:18) uriel: and he basically said that they had to build this huge  super complicated thing, to be able to debug the system as a whole because it had become impossible to know what the fuck was going on
(18:34:07) uriel: a system would crawl to a halt, and there were just so many layers of crap ('abstractions') that it was inpossible to sort out
(18:34:27) uriel: oh, and one finnal example of something that has become so complicated nobody understands it, in three letters: C++
(18:35:30) uriel: (oh, which reminds me of gcc, another pile of crap nobody understands, oh, and glibc, which has a mantainer that is a total asshole retar, but nobody else would want to get involved with such hideous mountain of shit code)
(18:35:55) uriel: (glibc is probably much worse than gcc, at least there are quite a few people that kind of understands parts of gcc)
(18:36:16) uriel: powerman-asdf: are those enough examples? ;P
(18:37:24) powerman: yep. but i'm trying to find prooflinks for these examples, that's the problem
(18:38:05) uriel: just link to a glibc tarball ;P
(18:38:09) powerman: hehe
(18:38:16) uriel: (gnu coreutils would do fine too)
(18:38:33) uriel: I think it was nemo that said the printed the code of plan9's and gnu cat
(18:38:35) uriel: in paper
(18:38:37) uriel: and would show it to people
(18:39:29) uriel:  you might want to check some of the bits in: http://fortunes.cat-v.org/cat-v/
(18:40:29) uriel: I'm actually thinking of starting a site to collect and display the worst code I can find, but too many other things to doo :(
(19:04:22) anth_x: powerman-asdf: do you follow 9fans? did you see the comparisons of various cats recently?
(19:04:39) powerman: actually, my article inspired by it :)
(19:04:43) anth_x: not quite the "nobody knows what it's doing", but it's an impressive study in complexity.
(19:04:43) anth_x: ah.
(19:05:29) powerman: i just trying to find other similar (to cat and copy.c) obvious examples, also with easy to proof links
(19:29:04) uriel: the problem is that there is so much crap it is impossible to refer to it
(19:29:09) uriel: compare the gcc source to kencc...
(19:29:24) uriel: it would take a pile of paper from here to the moon to print the gcc source
(19:45:36) powerman: and there no separate kencc distribution online, yeah?
(19:46:52) uriel: http://hg.cat-v.org/kenc/
(19:49:59) uriel: or one can just download the plan9 iso
(19:50:10) uriel: (they are also included both in the inferno and Go distributions)
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