I once worked for a small software company that became assimilated into Oracle. One thing that absolutely floored me about Oracle's source code was the sheer number of programmer names listed in the "changes" section, nearly all of whom had left Oracle by the time I read their code. As long as the big software companies have such huge turnover in their programming staff, they will also produce code that's poorly written and poorly understood, IMHO.
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I once worked for a small software company that became assimilated into Oracle. One thing that absolutely floored me about Oracle's source code was the sheer number of programmer names listed in the "changes" section, nearly all of whom had left Oracle by the time I read their code. As long as the big software companies have such huge turnover in their programming staff, they will also produce code that's poorly written and poorly understood, IMHO.