Quote:
Originally Posted by transversal
Well, if the code was not modularly written, it could be difficult to enhance. I would be surprised, though, in this day and age. I started coding in the '60s and even GOTOs were commonplace then. The mid-70s trend toward modular code should have meant that all newly trained programmers (since, say, 1980) should have been trained in the more modern technologies, which tend to enforce modularity. I guess you can mess up any language with bad coding practices though. The worst language could be C, which doesn't enforce anything. If this was code was written in C without adequate documentation, I could see where things could be difficult. I remember recently looking at a piece of C code I wrote on the fly in 1989 and it took me hours to figure it out, because when I coded it, I wasn't documenting my thought processes inside the code. C can be like that.
The software dates to the mid 90's, I think.
I have no inside knowledge of the situation. However, seemingly trivial things take months to change, and enhancements and corrections break seemingly unrelated things. Whatever attempts were made at black boxing appear to have been ineffective.
Online poker was (and is) the Wild Wild West, and this is a small to midsize firm. Literally nothing would surprise me regarding where the code was written and who wrote it. There is still unstructured, poorly tested, poorly documented code being written in the world today.
Usually the best course of action if the code is a mess is to walk away from it and start from scratch. But management doesn't necessarily realize that; a certain amount of capital and faith in the future is required; and employees, contractors, and consultants can profit from maintaining and enhancing code that should be discarded.
Again, I have no inside knowledge, just an educated guess.