Gretchen 's company recently got purchased by Initech. Specifically, they were bought for their dev team, of all things. They had a few software products that were high performers, and Initech wanted that secret sauce. They bought the company, and then split the dev team up and migrated the developers to new products.
That actually worked out okay for Gretchen, most of the time. For a few…
Today's anonymous submitter works in finance. I'll let them start the introduction:
This is a legacy application that has been running for nearly a decade in production so one could say that it's been thoroughly tested by daily production use and nothing needs changing
This is a collection of two C# methods, and we'll start with ValueAGPFund, which isn't a WTF per se, but definitely not…
Lillith was integrating some new tools into an existing Ruby on Rails API. The existing API allowed you to send a dry_run flag along with the request, so that you could have the service calculate its changes without applying them.
The problem was, the new tool Lillith was integrating could send, in the body of the request, {"dry_run": false}, but the service would see it as true.…
There's a language out there called "Progress Advanced Business Language" (or "Open Edge Advanced Business Language"). Just hearing that string of words in a sequence tells you you're in for it. It's a verbose, "English-like" programming language. But we're not here to pick on the language.
A long time ago, Mirjam had the "pleasure" of working in a Progress ABL environment. At some point,…
If you want to connect to another system, you need to supply credentials. That's a pretty obvious requirement. We can set aside the whole technical challenge of managing those credentials and the security problems various techniques create, and just focus in on: you must supply some credentials to authenticate.
Lisa has inherited a method which connects to another system. It, correctly, will…
Daniel recently started a new job. His first task was to fetch some data from the database and render it to the user. Easy enough, and there were already wrapper functions around the database to make it easy. He called execute_read, passed it a query, and checked the results.
There were no results. But the query definitely should have returned results. What was going on?
def…
A horse can only be so tenderized, but as well established at this point: I don't like Hungarian Notation. Richard G sends us an example of yet more of it, being misused, as well as some bad date handling. That's basically two of the easiest things to complain about, so let's take a look!
DateTime sCDate2 = Convert.ToDateTime(Hdn_SelectedDate.Value);
Double dStart2 =…
Stella (previously) sends us a much elided snippet. The original code is several thousand lines contained in a single try block. But the WTF is pretty clear without seeing all of that:
try:
# the whole business logic without any exception handling
except:
print("Fudge")
They didn't really say fudge of course, but we mostly try to keep profanity off our main page.…
We should always be _wary_ of "(.+)-driven development". Things like test-driven development, or domain-driven development are fine, but they're also frequently approached from a perspective of _dogma_ , which creates its own terrible outcomes.
But let's talk about domain-driven development. Without getting too bogged down into the details of the approach, the idea is pretty straightforward:…
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{(isAdmin || canSeeResults) && (If there's one thing that seems to be a constant source of issues, it's people constructing SQL queries through string concatenation. Even if you're using parameters in the query, I'm opposed to handling raw SQL as strings in my programs. My solution is always "use a builder"- an API that constructs a syntax tree that it can then _render_ to SQL as needed. (Yes, a builder, not an ORM, that's a…
Frank suspected something odd when he spotted a use of React's useMemo function in some JavaScript code. Now, there's nothing wrong with using that method, in and of itself. It watches some variables and recalculates a callback if they change for any reason. It's a great tool for when you want to avoid recalculating expensive things over and over again.
But in this case, the calculation…
Volodya sends us some bad date handling code in PHP. Which, I know, you're just reaching for the close tab and yawning when you hear that. You've seen it before. But bear with me, this one still has some fun bits to it.
$monthes = array(
1 => 'Января', 2 => 'Февраля', 3 => 'Марта', 4 => 'Апреля',
5 => 'Мая', 6 => 'Июня', 7 => 'Июля', 8 => 'Августа',
9…
Are there any files to send? That's the question that Chris C 's predecessor had. So they asked it. Again. And again. And again.
Chris writes:
I'm occasionally called upon to troubleshoot an ecommerce application that was built in the PHP 5.x days and has been running largely untroubled by maintenance or modernity (aside from the backported security patches to its binaries) ever…
It's a holiday in the US today, so we're reaching back into the archives. What we really need is a single function that can do it all, and by "it" we mean "ruin your life." Original --Remy
There are several types of bad code; there's lazy code, frantic code, unaware-of-a-better-way code, and aware-of-a-better-way-but-too-apathetic-to-do-it code, to name a few. Then there're amalgamations…
Delilah works in a Python shop. Despite Python's "batteries included" design, that doesn't stop people from trying to make their own batteries from potatoes. For example, her co-worker wrote this function:
def key_exists(element, key):
if isinstance(element, dict):
try:
element = element[key]
except KeyError:
return False
…
A depressing quantity of software is what I would call a "data pump". I have some data over here, and I need it over there. Maybe I'm integrating into a legacy app. Or into an ERP. Or into a 3rd party API. At the end of the day, I have data in one place, and I want it in another place.
Sally has a Java application written in the Quarkus framework, which has a nightly batch that works to keep…
Today's anonymous submitter sends us two blocks. The first is a perfectly normal line of React code:
const [width, setWidth] = useState(false)
This creates a width variable, defaulting it to false, and a setWidth function, which lets React detect when you change the variable, and trigger a re-render. Importantly, this mutation only happens on the next render , which means if you…
Russell F (previously) sends us a small one today. It's not just a representative line, it's a representative comment. More than that, it's a true confession. Russell wrote some code, you see, and the logic was confusing. So, a co-worker added a comment to explain what the code was doing:
'This is *supposed* to fail. If it fails to fail, it throws a failure message
Russell writes:
…
As previously discussed, C++ took a surprisingly long time to get a "starts with" function for strings. It took even longer to get a function called "contains". In part, that's simply because string::find solves that problem.
Nancy sends us a… different approach to solving this problem.
bool substringInString(string str, string::iterator &it)
{
string tmp;
bool result…
Today's anonymous submitter sends us some code that just makes your mind go… blank when you look at it.
public static boolean isNull(String value) {
return StringUtils.isBlank(value);
}
StringUtils.isBlank comes from the Apache Commons library. It's a helper function for Java which returns true if a string is, well, blank. "Blank" in this case is: empty, null, or only…
"This WTF is in Matlab" almost feels like cheating. At one place I worked, somebody's job was struggling through a mountain of Matlab code and porting it into C. "This Matlab code looks like it was written by an alien," also doesn't really get much traction- _all_ Matlab code looks like it was written by an alien. This falls into the realm of "Researchers use Matlab, researchers may be very smart…
A few years back, C# added the concept of "primary constructors". Instead of declaring the storage for class members and then initializing them in the constructor, you can annotate the class itself with the required fields, and C# automatically generates a constructor for you. It's all very TypeScript and very Microsoft, and certainly cuts down on some boilerplate.
Esben B 's team isn't…
We rip on PHP a lot, but I am willing to admit that the language and ecosystem have evolved over the years. What started as an ugly templating language is now just an ugly regular language.
But what happens when you still really want to do things with templates? Allison has inherited a Python-based, WSGI application which rejects any sort of formal routing or basic web development best…
Henrik H (previously) sends us a simple representative C# line:
static void GenerateCommercilaInvoice()
This is a static method which takes no parameters and returns nothing. Henrik didn't share the implementation, but this static function likely does something that involves side effects, maybe manipulating the database (to generate that invoice?). Or, possibly worse, it could be…
"Here, you're a programmer, take this over. It's business critical."
That's what Felicity 's boss told her when he pointed her to a network drive containing an Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet contained a pile of macros. The person who wrote it had left, and nobody knew how to make it work, but the macros in question were absolutely business vital.
Also, it's in French.
We'll take…
Nona writes: "this is the beginning of a 2100 line function."
That's bad. Nona didn't send us the entire JavaScript function, but sent us just the three early lines, which definitely raise concerns:
if (res.length > 0) {
await (function () {
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
We await a synchronous function which retuns a promise, passing a function to the…
Candice (previously) has another WTF to share for us.
We're going to start by just looking at one fragment of a class defined in this C++ code: TLAflaList.
Every type and variable has a three-letter-acronym buried in its name. The specific meaning of most of the acronyms are mostly lost to time, so "TLA" is as good as any other three random letters. No one knows what "fla" is.
What drew…
Tim (previously) supports a relatively ancient C++ application. And that creates some interesting conundrums, as the way you wrote C++ in 2003 is not the way you would write it even a few years later. The standard matured quickly.
Way back in 2003, it was still common to use C-style strings, instead of the C++ std::string type. It seems silly, but people had Strong Opinions™ about using…