A common source of bad code is when you have a developer who understands one thing very well, but is forced- either through organizational changes or the tides of history- to adapt to a new tool which they don’t understand. But a possibly more severe problem is modern developers not fully understanding why certain choices may have been made. Today’s code isn’t a WTF, it’s actually very smart.

Eric P was digging through some antique Fortran code, just exploring some retrocomputing history, and found a block which needed to check if two values were the same.

Tim Cooper was digging through the code for a trip-planning application. This particular application can plan a trip across multiple modes of transportation, from public transit to private modes, like rentable scooters or bike-shares.

This need to discuss private modes of transportation can lead to some… interesting code.

There are still some environments where C may not have easy access to a stdbool header file. That's easy to fix, of course. The basic pattern is to typedef an integer type as a boolean type, and then define some symbols for true and false. It's a pretty standard pattern, three lines of code, and unless you insist that FILE_NOT_FOUND is a boolean value, it's pretty hard to mess up.

Julien H was compiling some third-party C code, specifically in Visual Studio 2010, and as it turns out, VS2010 doesn't support C99, and thus doesn't have a stdbool. But, as stated, it's an easy pattern to implement, so the third party library went and implemented it:

It was a holiday weekend in the US, so we're taking a little break. Yes, I know that most people took Friday off, but as this article demonstrates, dates remain hard. Original -- Remy

It's not too uncommon to see a Java programmer write a method to get the name of a month based on the month number. Sure, month name formatting is built in via SimpleDateFormat, but the documentation can often be hard to read. And since there's really no other place to find the answer, it's excusable that a programmer will just write a quick method to do this.

I have to say though, Robert Cooper's colleague came up with a very interesting way of doing this: adding an[other] index to an array ...

The past few weeks, I’ve been writing software for a recording device. This is good, because when I’m frustrated by the bugs I put in the code and I start cursing at it, it’s not venting, it’s testing.

There are all sorts of other little things we can do to vent. Imagine, if you will, you find yourself writing an if with an empty body, but an else clause that does work. You’d probably be upset at yourself. You might be stunned. You might be so tired it feels like a good idea at the time. You might be deep in the throes of “just. work. goddammit”. Regardless of the source of that strain, you need to let it out somewhere.