One of my first jobs was a small software company writing software for a small number of clients, in MS basic PDS.
The lead developer didn't like to bother with formatting code, so I wrote a tool called makenice to format his nasty spaghetti gibberish into something with good indents and layout to make it easier for us normal people to parse.
He was furious, literally spun in circles about it right in the office in front of everyone, so I wrote makenasty to format code into the way he appeared to like.
I only shared makenasty/nice with a couple of the team, who loved it, as it allowed easy conversion between something readable and something the team lead like.
He never knew about makenasty.
burnte 14 minutes ago [-]
The floating spiral thing is so distracting I spent more time deleting it in Inspector than reading the article. I feel like they hate their readers. Awful.
varun_ch 52 minutes ago [-]
I’m shocked at the 25M line part! That is a completely unfathomable amount of code for one codebase. I really want to know more about that.
bruckie 4 minutes ago [-]
Only 25 million? :) Google had billions a decade ago...
That sounds even more insane to me, but I guess most of that code does not really touch financial transactions, otherwise it would be a nightmare being responsible to verify that.
CrzyLngPwd 4 minutes ago [-]
Surely, it no longer needs to be human-readable, and the era of write-only code is finally upon us with the dawn of AI writing our mealtickets.
Why bother formatting 25m lines of slop, and why is AI wasting tokens on making code look human-readable anyway?
hokkos 18 minutes ago [-]
Now it makes me wonder, are those 45M LoC are untyped ?
A major financial processing company writes it money handling systems in Ruby.
Terrifying.
mbStavola 55 minutes ago [-]
Considering that it's been doing so successfully at volume for just over 15 years, I think their language choice was fine.
sixo 21 minutes ago [-]
This ought to change your mind about Ruby!
skinfaxi 59 minutes ago [-]
Why is that terrifying?
mikedelago 5 minutes ago [-]
Some folks don't like shipping
Jtsummers 45 minutes ago [-]
It's not particularly terrifying. Some people really just don't like Ruby.
sikozu 55 minutes ago [-]
The systems have to be written in some kind of programming language, and I think Ruby is a perfectly fine choice.
Imustaskforhelp 28 minutes ago [-]
Not denying that Ruby is a perfectly fine choice but within the article itself it says that Stripe runs the world's largest Ruby codebase so certainly it might be testing the constraints of the language.
The thing I am interested is that I don't suppose that Stripe always had these many LOC's and so I would be curious to know if at any point as the codebase was increasing, were they looking at other new languages which were coming like golang or rust which was more suited for their work or not and what were there decisions/thinking process to continue using ruby.
sunrunner 18 minutes ago [-]
Things can always be worse. It could be PHP, for example.
burnte 38 seconds ago [-]
Facebook runs in it, so I think the language itself is probably a fine choice.
semiquaver 29 minutes ago [-]
I’d hardly call Sorbet Ruby :)
benbristow 34 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 21:39:04 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The lead developer didn't like to bother with formatting code, so I wrote a tool called makenice to format his nasty spaghetti gibberish into something with good indents and layout to make it easier for us normal people to parse.
He was furious, literally spun in circles about it right in the office in front of everyone, so I wrote makenasty to format code into the way he appeared to like.
I only shared makenasty/nice with a couple of the team, who loved it, as it allowed easy conversion between something readable and something the team lead like.
He never knew about makenasty.
https://research.google/pubs/why-google-stores-billions-of-l...
Why bother formatting 25m lines of slop, and why is AI wasting tokens on making code look human-readable anyway?
Terrifying.
The thing I am interested is that I don't suppose that Stripe always had these many LOC's and so I would be curious to know if at any point as the codebase was increasing, were they looking at other new languages which were coming like golang or rust which was more suited for their work or not and what were there decisions/thinking process to continue using ruby.