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Comment by webwielder2 | Hacker News Reader

The effort to untangle a 500 million year old codebase with zero comments leads to some strange discoveries.

With janky disassemblers, for an incompletely understood massively parallel processing environment, featuring non-deterministic execution into the bargain.

Yeah. Going to need more coffee..

Plus no tests, no original developers, and most of the time - _but just most of the time_ - it "just works"...

I'd say the coding and testing toolchain doesn't work most of the time. In fact it rarely does. But since we only see code changes that didn't kill the entire system permanently, we're left with a a huge amount of legacy trash and a few things on top of it that worked out by amazing coincidences accumulated over millions of years.

So what you're saying is that the universe does cargo cult :kekw:

It's even worse. A cargo cult has a reasonable, comparatively narrow scenario or goal to start with.

I mean, from the universe's perspective, the whole of Earth is a quite small thing

There's an integration test called natural selection.

Biology is probably the most obvious example of a maze of Chesterton fences all around.

The systems evolved spontaneously, with no design plan beforehand, so they often don't make immediate sense to us, logical creatures. Many of the features are weird, but we must be careful around them, because we don't know which purpose they serve or once served.

https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

And you do NOT want to get the "unbounded replication error"

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