What's the Longest Program You've Written? by ecjonas | tildeverse BBJ

>0 ecjonas @ 2026/04/10 13:51

Mine is about 1000 lines in Python

>1 cartwright @ 2026/04/10 13:54

8500+ lines of x86 assembly.

>2 ecjonas @ 2026/04/10 16:09

>>1
wow

>3 danielaw @ 2026/04/24 20:44

>>1

That sounds physically painful, to be honest.

>4 danielaw @ 2026/04/24 20:46

>>OP

I don't remember the exact program, but I have hit a few hundred lines of code before. I love coding, but I absolutely hate having to put in a lot of work for one program.

>5 Albatross @ 2026/04/27 19:17

>>4

Define "long"? Define "program"? I wrote an enormous Excel spreadsheet that
aligned NIST HIPAA policies with organizational controls and in turn
indicated gaps where our policies didn't meet HIPAA. It had hundreds or
thousands of cells that could call any of a number of custom functions. 
When complete it took half an hour to load. 

I wrote LOTS of programs when I was a C-language programmer in the 
1980s and 1990s. But my emphasis was on efficiency and elegance, so 
even my largest programs were main() and a bunch of functions, 
often recursive functions. Not terribly lengthy in terms of raw 
text. 

OTOH I was (too) often forced to debug the code of other programmers,
and their code was frequently garbage - big chunks of code where they
had identified similar functionality but instead of creating a function
they just duplicated the text, altered a couple of lines, and kept going.
That program was "longer" but was also garbage. (I once reduced 800 
lines of such code to two three-line functions and function call. And
I did this specifically because I was told NOT to because they were 
afraid to touch the garbage code and break something.)

I prefer "what was the BEST code you ever wrote?" There's nothing 
nicer than a short piece of elegant code that does exactly what needs
doing...