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Comment by andrelaszlo | Hacker News Reader

> there is a certain type of person that probably has all the mental horsepower required to be a phenomenal engineer that simply gets stuck on their "elegance"

and

> I do not understand how they are both smarter than me in many respects, and then still don't understand how stupid this all is.

This is such a good question. The absolute worst codebases I've worked on have been created by brilliant individuals. I remember spending months tracking down bugs leading to inconsistencies in the universal "Things" table. "Everything is a thing! Right?!" Wrong...

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Just though of another one! This worked surprisingly well and was really annoying at the same time.

The huge application consisted of a single PHP file. If you guessed that it was tens of thousands of lines long, you'd be wrong. It was only a few hundred lines, if not less!

The trick was storing code in the freaking database. The mother of all index.php's would simply query for the correct piece of code based on query parameters and eval it! They had an editor where you could make live code changes to the page, and even some rudimentary version control. Amazing times!

I'm experiencing moderate discomfort just reading this

I think a lot of devs go through a "I'll just store code in the DB and evaluate at runtime!" phase. Some of them never get through it though.

Before the web, the typical "client/server" application was a Windows program with a GUI that invokes queries and stored procedures directly on the database and shows the results.

If someone is tasked to port a similar application to the web, writing a PHP application that does the same is not a bad idea.

To be fair, once upon a time, it was actually thought of as a good idea to use databases for implementing version control.

The pros use JDSL and checkout their code live from Subversion.

> The absolute worst codebases I've worked on have been created by brilliant individuals.

+1 to this. Worked on a codebase where the (lone, unsupervised, I'm assuming) developer had created their own ORM and object model. Impressive! Except neither had been updated in the (5+, IIRC) years since the original dev left because they were hideously complex and fragile and thus increasingly a drag on getting anything done (which is why management were Very Keen on a total rewrite in A.N.Other language.)

That could be a symptom of a coder who has been successful in projects that hold everything in RAM, and doesn't understand, or underestimates, databases.

"Everything is a thing" works well in RAM; we have nicely working programming languages based on this. What could go wrong if everything is just a thing in the durable storage?

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