
Ask HN: Python or general programming horror stories? - brailsafe
I&#x27;ve recently started working on an open source python web framework having come from the frontend and previously other envs. I&#x27;ve fallen into the bowels of complex codebases that are hard to debug before, but this is a whole notha level of dependancy hell amonst other issues.<p>Do you have any horror stories of working for days or weeks just trying to get to a stable state of being able to write code productively? Terrible onboarding stories? I know you&#x27;re our there.
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sethammons
My first Python project I walked into was in Twisted and was a MySQL
abstraction layer and written by a crazy smart pair of folks where one of them
was the king of early (unneeded) abtractions. On top of that, the tech lead
wanted it to be ran in a Vagrant instance where he had set up most of the
requirements, but not all. I had never even used a VM at the time, let alone
worked on a project that dealt with multiple DB backends. I was handed it and
told nobody had time to help, figure it out. Two weeks later, and I finally
got the unit tests to pass and for it to actually start up.

The next one was likely the worst I've worked on. Twisted again. A shortened
link redirector. Like, should be simple. I had to change one variable for my
fist task in the codebase. I had to get help. It was hidden up three parent
classes and three mixins away. Also turned out the majority of unit tests
never would actually run because they didn't wait for the deferred events to
actually return. Tests passed because they were not given the time to actually
run assertions. Good times. :)

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ankurdhama
This is the story of every software system out there apart from "hello world"
kind of projects.

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scarface74
Yes but it’s much harder with non static languages. At least with static
languages, the IDE can reason about dependencies, usage of types, etc.

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LiamPa
I am intrigued, which library? Flask? Django? Surely not as the code is great
and very easy to debug.

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cimmanom
Zope/Plone? (Someone must still use those, right?)

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sloaken
I tend to experience this every time I have to take over from an amateur who
cannot be bothered to document their work.

