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These fine folks make it possible to run The Daily WTF.
An Anonymous quality analyst and audiophile accounted "As a returning customer at napalmrecords.com I was forced to update my Billing Address. Fine. Sure. But what if my *House number* is a very big number? More than 10 "symbols"? Fortunately, 0xDEADBEEF for House number and J****** for First Name both passed validation."
Most languages these days have some variation of "is string null or empty" as a convenience function. Certainly, C#, the language we're looking at today does. Let's look at a few example of how this can go wrong, from different developers.
We start with an example from Jason, which is useless, but not a true WTF:
We're going to start with the code, and then talk about it. You've seen it before, you know the chorus: bad date handling:
C_DATE($1)
C_STRING(7;$0)
C_STRING(3;$currentMonth)
C_STRING(2;$currentDay;$currentYear)
C_INTEGER($month)
$currentDay:=String(Day of($1))
$currentDay:=Change string("00";$currentDay;3-Length($currentDay))
$month:=Month of($1)
Case of
: ($month=1)
$currentMonth:="JAN"
: ($month=2)
$currentMonth:="FEB"
: ($month=3)
$currentMonth:="MAR"
: ($month=4)
$currentMonth:="APR"
: ($month=5)
$currentMonth:="MAY"
: ($month=6)
$currentMonth:="JUN"
: ($month=7)
$currentMonth:="JUL"
: ($month=8)
$currentMonth:="AUG"
: ($month=9)
$currentMonth:="SEP"
: ($month=10)
$currentMonth:="OCT"
: ($month=11)
$currentMonth:="NOV"
: ($month=12)
$currentMonth:="DEC"
End case
$currentYear:=Substring(String(Year of($1));3;2)
$0:=$currentDay+$currentMonth+$currentYear
Chris's company has an unusual deployment. They had a MySQL database hosted on Cloud Provider A. They hired a web development company, which wanted to host their website on Cloud Provider B. Someone said, "Yeah, this makes sense," and wrote the web dev company a sizable check. They app was built, tested, and released, and everyone was happy.
Everyone was happy until the first bills came in. They expected the data load for the entire month to be in the gigabytes range, based on their userbase and expected workloads. But for some reason, the data transfer was many terabytes, blowing up their operational budget for the year in a single month.
Guy picked up a bug ticket. There was a Hiesenbug; sometimes, saving a new entry in the application resulted in a duplicate primary key error, which should never happen.
The error was in the message-bus implementation someone else at the company had inner-platformed together, and it didn't take long to understand why it failed.
The Beast In Black is back with a simple but silly factual error on the part of the gateway to all (most) human knowledge.
Tobbi sends us a true confession: they wrote this code.
The code we're about to look at is the kind of code that mixes JavaScript and PHP together, using PHP to generate JavaScript code. That's already a terrible anti-pattern, but Tobbi adds another layer to the whole thing.
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.