The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Static State

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-17

Today's Anonymous submitter was reviewing some C++ code, and saw this perfectly reasonable looking pattern.

class SomeClass
{
public:
	void setField(int val);
	int getField();
}

6 comments - Last comment @ 14:45

Conventional Events

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-16

Now, I would argue that the event-driven lifecycle of ASP .Net WebForms is a bad way to design web applications. And it's telling that the model is basically dead; it seems my take is at best lukewarm, if not downright cold.

Pete inherited code from Bob, and Bob wrote an ASP .Net WebForm many many ages ago, and it's still the company's main application. Bob may not be with the company, but his presence lingers, both in the code he wrote and the fact that he commented frequently with // bob was here

6 comments - Last comment @ 11:14

Message Oriented Database

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-15

Mark was debugging some database querying code, and got a bit confused about what it was actually doing. Specifically, it generated a query block like this:

$statement="declare @status int
        declare @msg varchar(30)
        exec @status=sp_doSomething 'arg1', ...
        select @msg=convert(varchar(10),@status)
        print @msg
        ";

$result = sybase_query ($statement, $this->connection);

4 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-15

A Single Mortgage

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-04-14

We talked about singletons a bit last week. That reminded John of a story from the long ago dark ages where we didn't have always accessible mobile Internet access.

At the time, John worked for a bank. The bank, as all banks do, wanted to sell mortgages. This often meant sending an agent out to meet with customers face to face, and those agents needed to show the customer what their future would look like with that mortgage- payment calculations, and pretty little graphs about equity and interest.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-16

A Steady Ship

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-10

You know what definitely never changes? Shipping prices. Famously static, despite all economic conditions and the same across all shipping providers. It doesn't matter where you're shipping from, or to, you know exactly what the price will be to ship that package at all times.

Wait, what? You don't think that's true? It must be true, because Chris sent us this function, which calculates shipping prices, and it couldn't be wrong, could it?

27 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-15

Single or Mingle

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-09

Singletons is arguably the easiest to understand design pattern, and thus, one of the most frequently implemented design patterns, even- especially- when it isn't necessary. Its simplicity is its weakness.

Bartłomiej inherited some code which implemented this pattern many, many times. None of them worked quite correctly, and all of them tried to create a singleton a different way.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-13

Insanitize Your Inputs

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-08

Honestly, I don't know what to say about this code sent to us by Austin, beyond "I think somebody was very confused".

string text;
text = "";
// snip
box.Text = text;
text = "";
text = XMLUtil.SanitizeXmlString(text);

20 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-09

Unnavigable

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-07

Do you know what I had forgotten until this morning? That VBScript (and thus, older versions of Visual Basic) don't require you to use parentheses when calling a function. Foo 5 and Foo(5) are the same thing.

Of course, why would I remember that? I thankfully haven't touched any of those languages since about… 2012. Which is actually a horrifyingly short time ago, back when I supported classic ASP web apps. Even when I did, I always used parentheses because I wanted my code to be something close to readable.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-09