This reminds me of a code base. I used to work on an API that is widely used in my company. It's quite old, maybe 15-20 years old.
Once I had to look into a quite hairy part of it and I found it awful. Variables named ps and qs all over the place in lengthy functions.
I also found some copyright notes mentioning a guy who I already knew in the company but I had no idea that he had done development before. I had my own opinion that I obviously didn't share.
A bit later I read a relatively old book about C++ compilers. And while I was reading it, I realised that this guy didn't do anything bad. When he wrote the code, the length of variable names and the number of (virtual) function calls did matter.
The point is that if we read some old code and we find it unreadable, we shouldn't judge. Maybe that time it was the state-of-the-art, just times changed.
By the way that was far from being the oldest code... We decommissioned code coming from 70s just last year... Huge fun :D
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This reminds me of a code base. I used to work on an API that is widely used in my company. It's quite old, maybe 15-20 years old.
Once I had to look into a quite hairy part of it and I found it awful. Variables named
ps andqs all over the place in lengthy functions.I also found some copyright notes mentioning a guy who I already knew in the company but I had no idea that he had done development before. I had my own opinion that I obviously didn't share.
A bit later I read a relatively old book about C++ compilers. And while I was reading it, I realised that this guy didn't do anything bad. When he wrote the code, the length of variable names and the number of (virtual) function calls did matter.
The point is that if we read some old code and we find it unreadable, we shouldn't judge. Maybe that time it was the state-of-the-art, just times changed.
By the way that was far from being the oldest code... We decommissioned code coming from 70s just last year... Huge fun :D