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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:
Aug 25C_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.
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:
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.
"These results are incomprensible," Brian wrote testily. "The developers at SkillCertPro must use math derived from an entirely different universe than ours. I can boast a world record number of answered questions in one hour and fifteen minutes somewhere."
Today's Java snippet comes from Capybara James.
The first sign something was wrong was this:
Henrik H sends us a short snippet, for a relative value of short.
We've all seen this method before, but this is a particularly good version of it:
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."
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.
In today's Error'd episode, we flirt with European English to acknowledge the GDPR.
Modern Architect jeffphi shared an example of a hot software pattern from the early 21st. "As a bonus, these pickleball events appear to come with pickleball event listeners, too!"
It's that time to take a look at a few short snippets.
Boolean values can hold true or false. But is that truly self documenting? I think we need clearer variable names for this. Certainly, the snippet Nonymous found thinks so:
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?
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!
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.