[HN Gopher] Alien Artefacts
___________________________________________________________________
Alien Artefacts
Author : varjag
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-04-16 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brautaset.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brautaset.org)
| dustingetz wrote:
| so to be clear, having such an artifact is _better_ than having
| classical legacy code, because it shares all the same downsides
| but has a unique upside, being "well tested, well documented, and
| elegant"
| Etheryte wrote:
| As someone who has worked with an artifact or a few over the
| years, I definitely agree. The most colorful example was when I
| tried to rewrite one from scratch just to thoroughly understand
| all the business logic in it. By the time I ironed out all the
| bugs my code was practically identical to the original.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| > Thanks to ChatGPT for valuable feedback and editorial input on
| early drafts of this post. It was a joy collaborating with it. It
| provided consistent and helpful feedback, and was always
| available to assist with any changes or questions I had during
| the collaboration process2.
|
| That kind of things will for sure go into my domain's blacklist
| jhbadger wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see how this attitude holds up over
| time. I think using (and acknowledging using) AI tools will
| become normalized, much like mobile phone use has been. I
| remember a time (less than twenty years ago) when I was going
| to dinner with friends and one of them made (at the time) the
| huge social faux-pas of accepting a call at the table. People
| seriously complained about it. Now that's normal behavior.
| grogenaut wrote:
| It's still rude. I'll accept the quick spouse/so update, the
| actual emergency or the "hey I might have to talk to x" but
| that's about it. If you're there to hang out and talk then do
| that. If you're just going to fuck with your phone the whole
| time you might as well not be there.
|
| I'll also accept phone use as a furtherance of the
| discussion, eg pulling up details, addresses, info, memes to
| share, etc, but that still all focuses back on us being there
| together, not you being there in name only.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Not normal when I go out to eat. What kind of people think
| its socially acceptable to accept a phone call unless its an
| emergency?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| How is that substantially different than using grammarly or a
| spell checker?
| rektide wrote:
| Nearly passed based on title alone, was very glad I clicked in.
| Just the first paragraph alone sets up this excellent & useful
| neologism, _Alien Artefacts:_
|
| > _The purpose of this blog post is to introduce the concept of
| alien artefacts1, a subcategory of legacy code. I use the term to
| describe particularly complicated and important pieces of
| software written by very smart engineers that are no longer
| working for the company--and thus not available to support it.
| The software works really well for what it was designed to do,
| but it is highly resistant to change._
|
| We have some very wild search code that I think of that
| qualifies. I also recently added tests & typescript then slowly
| expanded some really neat code that takes Immutable.js, maps the
| entities, then caches the result in WeakMap to be re-resolvable
| latter- sounds simple but there was enough extra stuff also going
| on & happening that it took some putting heads together to
| decypher the true inner-workings. Both very distinct features
| which hadn't had the typical accrual of cruft, mostly untouched
| since inception, off in their own area. Alien Artefacts feels
| like a great term.
|
| (BTW what spelling is this? Same word as artifact or no?)
| fwlr wrote:
| A less common spelling of "artifact", yes.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Artefact is how the word is spelled in British English.
| drewg123 wrote:
| This reminds me of the famous _" you are not expected to
| understand this"_ comment in the UNIX V6 context switch code.
|
| https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...
| taraharris wrote:
| SolveSpace is an alien artifact. I can safely say that because
| I've spent months working on it, porting it to Haiku OS. It is
| validating to know that this phenomenon is real enough to justify
| a name for it!
| https://github.com/realtaraharris/solvespace/tree/realtaraha...
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I remember writing this kind of stuff. Couple years after I left
| they'd re-written it, just so they would have somebody who
| understood it. My friend reported their engineer visiting his
| office often to exclaim over something he now understood!
|
| It helps to rewrite something with example code in hand. You end
| up understanding everything.
|
| (I did not mean to be opaque; we were a startup and it was hurry-
| up-and-be-done-yesterday code)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-04-16 23:00 UTC)