I would think that on HN one of these would automatically be considered more worthy of one's time than the other.
He told me that the idea was to 'shut his brain off' from his day-to-day work, while other more intensive hobbies would drain him further.
Given the size of the code, once you’ve found the dialog, I guess backtracking to see how it can get called isn’t too hard (a fuzzer that you can ask “give me a series of inputs that gets this procedure called” might even answer that question for you)
I hope all of this information about legacy systems is documented somewhere on the internet, but I'm a afraid a lot of it might not be, and is lost as these older devs who made and worked with these systems get older and pass away.
> Originally considered by Allied scientists in World War II, it proved so intractable that, according to Peter Whittle, the problem was proposed to be dropped over Germany so that German scientists could also waste their time on it.[13]
[13] Whittle, Peter (1979), "Discussion of Dr Gittins' paper", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 41 (2): 148–177, doi:10.1111/j.2517-6161.1979.tb01069.x