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The Daily WTF | Curious Perversions in Information Technology - Cheezy
7 | Follower
Brace Yourself - The Daily WTF
Today's representative line is almost too short to be a full line. But I haven't got a category for representative characters, so we'll roll with it. First, though, we need the setup. Brody inherited a massive project for a government organization. It was the kind of code base that had thousands of lines per file, and frequently thousands of lines per function. Almost none of those lines were comments. Almost.
Reduced to a Union - The Daily WTF
The code Clemens M supported worked just fine for ages. And then one day, it broke. It didn't break after a deployment, which implied some other sort of bug. So Clemens dug in, playing the game of "what specific data rows are breaking the UI, and why?" One of the organizational elements of their system was the idea of "zones". I don't know the specifics of the application as a whole, but we can broadly describe it thus:
Functionally, a Date - The Daily WTF
Dates are messy things, full of complicated edge cases and surprising ways for our assumptions to fail. They lack the pure mathematical beauty of other data types, like integers. But that absence doesn't mean we can't apply the beautiful, concise, and simple tools of functional programming to handling dates. I mean, you or I could. J Banana's co-worker seems to struggle a bit with it.
Myopic Focus - The Daily WTF
Chops was a developer for Initrode. Early on a Monday, they were summoned to their manager Gary's office before the caffeine had even hit their brain. Gary glowered up from his office chair as Chops entered. This wasn't looking good. "We need to talk about the latest commit for Taskmaster."
Pretty Little State Machine - The Daily WTF
State machines are a powerful way to organize code. They are, after all, one of the fundamental models of computation. That's pretty good. A well designed state machine can make a complicated problem clear, and easy to understand. Chris, on the other hand, found this one.
Adding to the Argument - The Daily WTF
David G saw a pull request with a surprisingly long thread of comments on it. What was weirder was that the associated ticket was all about adding a single parameter to an existing method. What could be generating that much discussion? How could adding an argument add to an argument?
Classic WTF: We Are Not Meatbots! - The Daily WTF
Today's Labor Day in the US, a day where we celebrate workers. Well, some of us. This story from the archives is one of the exceptions. Original. --Remy Sales, as everyone knows, is the mortal enemy of Development. Their goals are opposite, their people are opposite, their tactics are opposite. Even their credos - developers "Make a good product" but sales will "Do anything to get that money" - are at complete odds.
The Modern Job Hunt: Part 1 - The Daily WTF
Ellis knew she needed a walk after she hurried off of Zoom at the end of the meeting to avoid sobbing in front of the group. She'd just been attending a free online seminar regarding safe job hunting on the Internet. Having been searching since the end of January, Ellis had already picked up plenty of first-hand experience with the modern job market, one rejection at a time. She thought she'd attend the seminar just to see if there were any additional things she wasn't aware of. The seminar had gone well, good information presented in a clear and engaging way. But by the end of it, Ellis was feeling bleak. Goodness gracious, she'd already been slogging through months of this. Hundreds of job applications with nothing to show for it. All of the scams out there, all of the bad actors preying on people desperate for their and their loved ones' survival!
Springs are Optional - The Daily WTF
Optional types are an attempt to patch the "billion dollar mistake". When you don't know if you have a value or not, you wrap it in an Optional, which ensures that there is a value (the Optional itself), thus avoiding null reference exceptions. Then you can query the Optional to see if there is a real value or not. This is all fine and good, and can cut down on some bugs. Good implementations are loaded with convenience methods which make it easy to work on the optionals.
The HTML Print Value - The Daily WTF
Matt was handed a pile of VB .Net code, and told, "This is yours now. I'm sorry." As often happens, previous company leadership said, "Why should I pay top dollar for experienced software engineers when I can hire three kids out of college for the same price?" The experiment ended poorly, and the result was a pile of bad VB code, which Matt now owned.
Not What They Meant By Watching "AndOr" - The Daily WTF
Today's awfulness comes from Tim H, and while it's technically more than one line, it's so representative of the code, and so short that I'm going to call this a representative line. Before we get to the code, we need to talk a little history. Tim's project is roughly three decades old. It's a C++ tool used for a variety of research projects, and this means that 90% of the people who have worked on it are PhD candidates in computer science programs. We all know the rule of CompSci PhDs and programming: they're terrible at it. It's like the old joke about the farmer who, when unable to find an engineer to build him a cow conveyer, asked a physicist. After months of work, the physicist introduced the result: "First, we assume a perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum…"
The C-Level Ticket - The Daily WTF
Everyone's got workplace woes. The clueless manager; the disruptive coworker; the cube walls that loom ever higher as the years pass, trapping whatever's left of your soul. But sometimes, Satan really leaves his mark on a joint. I worked Tech Support there. This is my story. Who am I? Just call me Anonymous.
I Am Not 200 - The Daily WTF
In theory, HTTP status codes should be easy to work with. In the 100s? You're doing some weird stuff and breaking up large requests into multiple sub-requests. 200s? It's all good. 300s? Look over there. 400s? What the hell are you trying to do? 500s? What the hell is the server trying to do? This doesn't mean people don't endlessly find ways to make it hard. LinkedIn, for example, apparently likes to send 999s if you try and view a page without being logged in. Shopify has invented a few. Apache has added a 218 "This is Fine". And then there's WebDAV, which not only adds new status codes, but adds a whole bunch of new verbs to HTTP requests.
Raise VibeError - The Daily WTF
Ronan works with a vibe coder- an LLM addicted developer. This is a type of developer that's showing up with increasing frequency. Their common features include: not reading the code the AI generated, not testing the code the AI generated, not understanding the context of the code or how it integrates into the broader program, and absolutely not bothering to follow the company coding standards. Here's an example of the kind of Python code they were "writing":
An Array of Parameters - The Daily WTF
Andreas found this in a rather large, rather ugly production code base. private static void LogView(object o) { try { ArrayList al = (ArrayList)o; int pageId = (int)al[0]; int userId = (int)al[1]; // ... snipped: Executing a stored procedure that stores the values in the database } catch (Exception) { } }
Going Crazy - The Daily WTF
For months, everything at Yusuf's company was fine. Then, suddenly, he comes in to the office to learn that overnight the log exploded with thousands of panic messages. No software changes had been pushed, no major configurations had happened- just a reboot. What had gone wrong? This particular function was invoked as part of the application startup:
A Countable - The Daily WTF
Once upon a time, when the Web was young, if you wanted to be a cool kid, you absolutely needed two things on your website: a guestbook for people to sign, and a hit counter showing how many people had visited your Geocities page hosting your Star Trek fan fiction. These days, we don't see them as often, but companies still like to track the information, especially when it comes to counting downloads. So when Justin started on a new team and saw a download count in their analytics, he didn't think much of it at all. Nor did he think much about it when he saw the download count displayed on the download page.
Round Strips - The Daily WTF
JavaScript is frequently surprising in terms of what functions it does not support. For example, while it has a Math.round function, that only rounds to the nearest integer, not an arbitrary precision. That's no big deal, of course, as if you wanted to round to, say, four decimal places, you could write something like: Math.floor(n * 10000) / 10000. But in the absence of a built-in function to handle that means that many developers choose to reinvent the wheel. Ryan found this one.
Voluntold - The Daily WTF
It is said (allegedly by the Scots) that confession heals the soul. But does it need to be strictly voluntary? The folks toiling away over at CodeSOD conscientiously change the names to protect the innocent but this side of the house is committed to curing the tortured souls of webdevs. Whether they like it or not. Sadly Sam's submission has been blinded, so the black black soul of xxxxxxxxxxte.com remains unfortunately undesmirched, but three others should be experiencing the sweet sweet healing light of day right about now. I sure hope they appreciate it. More monkey business this week from Reinier B. who is hoping to check in on some distant cousins. "I'll make sure to accept email from {email address}, otherwise I won't be able to visit {zoo name}."
An Annual Report - The Daily WTF
Michael has the "fun" task of converting old, mainframe-driven reports into something more modern. This means reading through reams of Intelligent Query code. Like most of these projects, no one has a precise functional definition of what it's supposed to do. The goal is to replace the system with one that behaves exactly the same, but is more "modern". This means their test cases are "run the two systems in parallel and compare the outputs; if they match, the upgrade is good."
Divine Comedy - The Daily WTF
"Code should be clear and explain what it does, comments should explain why it does that." This aphorism is a decent enough guideline, though like any guidance short enough to fit on a bumper sticker, it can easily be overapplied or misapplied. Today, we're going to look at a comment Salagir wrote. This comment does explain what the code does, can't hope to explain why, and instead serves as a cautionary tale. We're going to take the comment in sections, because it's that long.
A Dropped Down DataSet - The Daily WTF
While I frequently have complaints about over-reliance on Object Relational Mapping tools, they do offer key benefits. For example, mapping each relation in the database to a type in your programming language at least guarantees a bit of type safety in your code. Or, you could be like Nick L's predecessor, and write VB code like this. For i As Integer = 0 To SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows.Count - 1 Try 'Handles DBNull Select Case SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(0) Case "Bently" 'Probes Probes_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim) Case "Keyphasor" Keyphasor_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim) Case "Transmitter" Transmitter_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim) Case "Tachometer" Tachometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim.ToUpper.ToString.Trim) Case "Dial Therm" DialThermometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim) Case "DPS" DPS_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim) Case "Pump Bracket" PumpBracket_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim) Case "Accelerometer" Accelerometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim) Case "Velometer" Velometer_Combobox.Items.Add(SQLDataset.Tables(0).Rows(i).Item(1).ToUpper.ToString.Trim) End Select Catch 'MessageBox.Show(text:="Error during SetModelNums().", _ ' caption:="Error", _ ' buttons:=MessageBoxButtons.OK, _ ' icon:=MessageBoxIcon.Error) End Try Next
Concatenated Validation - The Daily WTF
User inputs are frequently incorrect, which is why we validate them. So, for example, if the user is allowed to enter an "asset ID" to perform some operation on it, we should verify that the asset ID exists before actually doing the operation. Someone working with Capybara James almost got there. Almost.
What a CAD - The Daily WTF
In my career, several times I've ended up being the pet programmer for a team of engineers and CNC operators, which frequently meant helping them do automation in their CAD tools. At its peak complexity, it resulted in a (mostly unsuccessful) attempt to build a lens/optics simulator in RhinoCAD. Which brings us to the code Nick L sends us. It sounds like Nick's in a similar position: engineers write VB.Net code to control their CAD tool, and then Nick tries desperately to get them to follow some sort of decent coding practice. The result is code like:
It's Getting Hot in Here - The Daily WTF
Or cold. It's getting hot and cold. But on average... no. It's absolutely unbelievable. "There's been a physics breakthrough!" Mate exclaimed. "Looking at meteoblue, I should probably reconsider that hike on Monday." Yes, you should blow it off, but you won't need to.
An Exert Operation - The Daily WTF
The Standard Template Library for C++ is… interesting. A generic set of data structures and algorithms was a pretty potent idea. In practice, early implementations left a lot to be desired. Because the STL is a core part of C++ at this point, and widely used, it also means that it's slow to change, and each change needs to go through a long approval process. Which is why the STL didn't have a std::map::containsfunction until the C++20 standard. There were other options. For example, one could usestd::map::count, to count how many times a key appear. Or you could use std::map::findto search for a key. One argument against adding astd::map::containsfunction is thatstd::map::count basically does the same job and has the same performance.
A Unique Way to Primary Key - The Daily WTF
"This keeps giving me a primary key violation!" complained one of Nancy's co-workers. "Screw it, I'm dropping the primary key constraint!" That was a terrifying thing to hear someone say out loud. Nancy decided to take a look at the table before anyone did anything they'd regret.