The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Recent Representative Line

A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.

It Only Crashes When It Works

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2019-01-09

We already know that Kara’s office has a problem with strings. Kara’s back again, with more string related troubles.

These troubles are a bit worse, once we add in some history. You see, some of their software does machine control. That is to say, it sends commands to some bit of machinery, which then moves or extrudes or does whatever the machine does. Kara wasn’t specific, only granted that this machine was neither large enough or mean enough to kill someone. Minor cuts, burns, scrapes, bruises and damage to the equipment itself is still possible, but nobody will die.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-11

Innumerable Enum

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2019-01-02

Ah, the enumerated type. At its core, it's really just a compile-time check to ensure that this constant containing 1 isn't getting confused with this other constant, also containing 1.

We usually ignore the actual numbers in our enums, though not always. Perhaps, though, we should just pay more attention to them in general, that way we don't end up with code like Andrew found.

49 comments - Last comment @ 2022-10-29