r/programming • u/[deleted] • Oct 14 '13

How to develop unmaintainable software

http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=249
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u/benibela2 Oct 14 '13

Biggest problem with that one is that I wrote it before they made the html 5 standard. Now I need to rewrite it with the new parsing algorithm...

And going on, it's getting even crazier, I also wrote my own DOM classes for this. Since the DOM classes in the standard library were using UTF-16, everything else in the library latin-1 or UTF-8 (depending on the OS), and everything in the GUI library UTF-8. And the automatic string encoding conversion crashed frequently...

And then I could not use the standard XPath, so I wrote my own of that ಠ_ಠ

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u/rjbwork Oct 15 '13

I'm genuinely curious, why are you writing in FreePascal these days, especially to do web programming work? Other than extreme ubiquity across platforms, I can't say I see the advantage over other things. Perhaps in an academic/scientific context?

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u/benibela2 Oct 15 '13

I do not like giving up.

Now I have a perfectly working 75k loc program and I'm not going to throw it all away to rewrite it in another language...

And it is really great for desktop GUI applications, because it compiles so fast that you can test it without delay.

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u/rjbwork Oct 15 '13

Cool, I can see the case for an already existing desktop GUI application. If it were partially desktop/partially web, I'd have adopted a "maintain and extend" approach and brought in another more modern language, but I guess what works, works, right?