Forums
Most of us, when generating a UUID, will reach for a library to do it. Even a UUIDv4, which is just a random number, presents challenges: doing randomness correctly is hard, and certain bits within the UUID are reserved for metadata about what kind of UUID we're generating.
But Gretchen's co-worker didn't reach for a library. What they did reach for was… regular expressions?
There are real advantages to taking a functional programming approach to expressing problems. Well, some problems, anyway.
Kevin sends us this example of elegant, beautiful functional code in C#:
Greg was fighting with an academic CMS, and discovered that a file called write_helper.js was included on every page. It contained this single function:
function document_write(s)
{
document.write(s);
}
Gretchen saw this line in the front-end code for their website and freaked out:
let bucket = new AWS.S3({ params: { Bucket: 'initech-logos' } });
One thing I've learned by going through our reader submissions over the years is that WTFs never start with just one mistake. They're a compounding sequence of systemic failures. When we have a "bad boss" story, where an incompetent bully puts an equally incompetent sycophant in charge of a project, it's never just about the bad boss- it's about the system that put the bad boss in that position. For every "Brillant" programmer, there's a whole slew of checkpoints which should have stopped them before they went too far.
With all that in mind, today we're doing a news roundup about the worst boss of them all, the avatar of Dunning-Kruger, Elon Musk. Because over the past month, a lot has happened, and there are enough software and IT related WTFs that I need to talk about them.
Abdoullah sends us this little blob of C#, which maybe isn't a full-on WTF, but certainly made me chuckle.
if (file!= null)
{
if (file.name.StartsWith(userName))
{
if (file.name.StartsWith(userName))
{
url = string.Format(FILE_LINK, file.itemId, file.name);
break;
}
}
}
Eric writes:
Yes, we actually do have code reviews and testing practices. A version of this code was tested successfully prior to this version being merged in, somehow.
As the saying goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidations, and off by one errors. Chris's predecessor decided to tackle the second one, mostly by accurately(?) naming a class:
class SimpleCache
{
}