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Comment by mst | Hacker News Reader

Eeeek. That code would've been terrible practice in 2000 when I first started writing Perl :(

The Mysql module was deprecated in favour of the unified DBI interface, cgi-lib.pl was a perl4 library that was replaced by a module called CGI (shipped with perl5 itself from 5.4+).

Calling functions with & is a perl4-ism and almost always the wrong thing to do in perl5, and C-style for is silly in most cases in Perl - for example; the loops in there would likely be better redone as foreach loops, or possibly just a grep.

And, of course, YAY not using placeholders in the SQL.

sigh

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Just goes to show how much code quality contributes to a successful product.

Fully agree with you on that. Perfectionism or shooting the bird with one bullet only is not what made Facebook a billion dollar company.

a) Serve b) Improve quality c) goto a)

No it doesn't - it only demonstrates that products can succeed despite poor code quality.

I think that's what he meant... it shows how much code quality contributes to success: not much at all.

And that's exactly what I didn't mean. It's a sample of one, and offers no information whatsoever about how much code quality can contribute to success, except that rubbish code doesn't totally preclude the hope that a product might be successful.

Let's say things had turned out a little differently, and someone had used one of those SQL injections to irreversibly erase all of early Facebook's data. We'd probably never have heard of it again.

Code quality is a good thing - like scalability, and security. Ultimately, you might succeed without it. But it'll probably be easier if you do.

my fave snippet is from line 206:

To be fair I've seen that pattern in just about every codebase I've touched, sadly.

What do you mean? Is that considered too deep nesting? (I'm not trying to be sarcastic.)

It means nikatwork is not going to like the aesthetics of lisp.

I like Lisp.

My problem with this code is not aesthetics. This logic is too deeply nested, by the time you hit the last conditional there is way too much going on[1].

Perl makes it especially nice to flatten logic due to RHS conditionals, eg "x++ if y;". Here is my two minute flattening job[2], it prob has syntactic errors but you get the gist.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...

[2] http://pastebin.com/4TDVftpJ

Needs more maps and greps. :)

Seriously though, I use maps and greps a lot now, often chained to transform a data structure from one type to another. I'm annoyed when I have to drop to a for(each) loop.

Yeah maps are awesome! I only changed the conditionals and nothing else, to show how easy it is to flatten deeply-nested logic.

Lots of SQL injection in there, too.

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