alt Hacker NewsYeah! It's not like code quality matters in terms of negative value or lives lost, right?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_IT_scandal
Furthermore,
> As for the artifact that Tan was building with such frenetic energy, I was broadly ignoring it. Polish software engineer Gregorein, however, took it apart, and the results are at once predictable, hilarious and instructive: A single load of Tan’s "newsletter-blog-thingy" included multiple test harnesses (!), the Hello World Rails app (?!), a stowaway text editor, and then eight different variants of the same logo — one of which with zero bytes.
Do you think any of the... /things/ bundled in this software increased the surface area that attacks could be leveraged against?
Replies
> a stowaway text editor
?!
Was it hiding in one of the lifeboats?
The Horizon IT scandal was not caused by poor code quality, the scandal was the corrupt employees of the UK government/Post Office. Poor quality code might have caused the error, but the failure to investigate the errors and sweep them under the rug was made by humans.
> included multiple test harnesses (!)
ive seen plenty of real code written by real people with multiple test harnesses and multiple mocking libraries.
its still kinda irrelevant to whether the code does anything useful; only a descriptor of the funding model
I also struggle with this all the time, balance between bringing value/joy and level of craft. Most human written stuff might look really ugly or was written in a weird way but as long as it’s useful it’s ok.
What I don’t like here is the bragging about the LoC. He’s not bragging about the value it could provide. Yes people also write shitty code but they don’t brag about it - most of the time they are even ashamed.