The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Dash of SQL

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-23

As developers, we often have to engage with management who doesn't have a clue what it is we do, or how. Even if that manager was technical once, their technical background is frequently out of date, and their spirit has been sapped by the endless meetings and politics that being a manager entails. And it's often these managers who have some degree of control over where our career is going to progress, so we need to make them happy.

Which means… <clickbait-voice>LEVEL UP YOUR CAREER WITH THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK!</clickbait-voice>. You need to make managers happy, and if there's one thing that makes managers happy, it's dashboards. Take something complicated and multivariate, and boil it down to a simple system. Traffic lights are always a favorite: green is good, red is bad, yellow is also bad.

21 comments - Last comment @ 07:48

Globalism

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-21

When Daniel was young, he took one of those adventure trips that included a multi-day hike through a rainforest. At the time, it was one of the most difficult and laborious experiences he'd ever had.

Then he inherited an antique PHP 5.3 application, written by someone who names variables like they're spreadsheet columns: $ag, $ah, and $az are all variables which show up. Half of those are globals. The application is "modularized" into many, many PHP files, but this ends up creating include chains tens of files deep, which makes it nigh impossible to actually understand.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-22

Expiration Dates

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-20

Last week, we saw some possibly ancient Pascal code. Leilani sends us some more… modern Pascal to look at today.

This block of code comes from a developer who has… some quirks. For example, they have a very command-line oriented approach to design. This means that, even when making a GUI application, they want convenient keyboard shortcuts. So, to close a dialog, you hit "CTRL+C", because who would ever use that keyboard shortcut for any other function at all? There's no reason a GUI would use "CTRL+C" for anything but closing windows.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-21

Subbing for the Subcontractors

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-16

Back in the mid-2000s, Maurice got less than tempting offer. A large US city had hired a major contracting firm, that contracting firm had subcontracted out the job, and those subcontractors let the project spiral completely out of control. The customer and the primary contracting firm wanted to hire new subcontractors to try and save the project.

As this was the mid-2000s, the project had started its life as a VB6 project. Then someone realized this was a terrible idea, and decided to make it a VB.Net project, without actually changing any of the already written code, though. That leads to code like this:

19 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-23

The Programmer's Motto and Other Comments

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-15

We've got a lovely backlog of short snippets of code, and it's been a long time since our last smorgasbord, so let's take a look at some… choice cuts.

Let's open with a comment, found by Russell F:

38 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-22

Wise About Bits

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-14

The HP3000 was the first mini-computer that supported time-sharing. It launched in 1972, and HP didn't end-of-life it until 2010, and there are still third-party vendors supporting them.

Leonora's submission is some code she encountered a number of years ago, but not as many as you might think. It's in Pascal, and it's important to note that this version of Pascal definitely has bitwise operators. But, if you're programming on a 40 year old minicomputer, maybe you couldn't do an Internet search, and maybe Steve from down the hall had bogarted the one manual HP provided for the computer so you can't look it up because "he's using it for reference."

25 comments - Last comment @ 06:16

A Coded Escape

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-13

When evaluating a new development tool or framework, the first thing the smart developer does is check out the vendor documentation. Those docs will either be your best friend, or your worst enemy. A great product with bad documentation will provide nothing but frustration, but even a mediocre product with clean and clear documentation at least lets you get useful stuff done.

Stuart Longland's company has already picked the product, unfortunately, so Stuart's left combing through the documentation. This particular product exposes a web-socket based API, and thus includes JavaScript samples in its documentation. Obviously, one could use any language they like to talk to web-sockets, but examples are nice…

15 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-19

Going Through Some Changes

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-09

Dave inherited a data management tool. It was an antique WinForms application that users would use to edit a whole pile of business specific data in one of those awkward "we implemented a tree structure on top of an RDBMS" patterns. As users made changes, their edits would get marked with a "pending" status, allowing them to be saved in the database and seen by other users, but with a clear "this isn't for real yet" signal.

One developer had a simple task: update a text box with the number of pending changes, and if it's non-zero, make the text red and boldfaced. This developer knew that some of these data access methods might not return any data, so they were very careful to "handle" exceptions.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-16

Columns of a Constant Length

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-08

Today's submitter goes by "[object Object]", which I appreciate the JavaScript gag even when they send us C code.

This particular bit of C code exists to help output data in fixed-width files. What you run into, with fixed-width files, is that it becomes very important to properly pad all your columns. It's not a difficult programming challenge, but it's also easy to make mistakes that cause hard-to-spot bugs. And given that most systems using fixed-width files are legacy systems with their own idiosyncrasies, things could easily go wrong.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-19

Insertion

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-07

Shalonda inherited a C# GUI application that, if we're being charitable, has problems. It's slow, it's buggy, it crashes a lot. The users hate it, the developers hate it, but it's also one of the core applications that drives their business, so everyone needs to use it.

One thing the application needs to do is manage a list of icons. Each icon is an image, and based on user actions, a new icon might get inserted in the middle of the list. This is how that happens:

27 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-15

Dangerous Tools for Dangerous Users

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-02

Despite being a programmer, I make software that goes in big things, which means that my workplace frequently involves the operation of power tools. My co-workers… discourage me from using the power tools. I'm not the handiest of people, and thus watching me work is awkward, uncomfortable, and creates a sense of danger. I'm allowed to use impact drivers and soldering irons, but when it comes time to use some of the more complex power saws, people gently nudge me aside.

There are tools that are valuable, but are just dangerous in the hands of the inexperienced. And even if they don't hurt themselves, you might end up boggling at the logic which made them use the tool that way. I'm talking, of course, about pre-compiler macros.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-04

Maintaining Yourself

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-09-01

When moving from one programming language to another, it's easy to slip into idioms that might be appropriate in one, but are wildly out of place in another. Tammy's company has some veteran developers who spent most of their careers developing in COBOL, and now' they're developing in C#. As sufficiently determined programmers, they're finding ways to write COBOL in C#. Bad COBOL.

Methods tend towards long- one thousand lines of code isn't unusual. Longer methods exist. Every method starts with a big long pile of variable declarations. Objects are used more as namespaces than anything relating to object-oriented design. So much data is passed around as 2D arrays, because someone liked working with data like it lived in a table.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-10

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