Forums
These fine folks make it possible to run The Daily WTF.
A fair bit of "bad code" requires at least a passing understanding of the language in question, or the domain involved. But bad comments transcend programming languages. Vilx sends us this one, which comes from code which is definitely running in production.
// WARNING!!! Special case for [external API] testing.
// DO NOT LET THIS PIECE OF CODE FIND IT'S WAY TO PRODUCTION
Octavia (previously) didn't just inherit a C# application with dodgy approaches to string handling. It's also an application with questionable understandings of CSS.
CSS is far from perfect, and offers a lot of pitfalls and traps. There's a reason the "impossibility" of vertically centering text is a punchline. It's so flexibly declarative that, in many cases, there are many ways to achieve the same styling result, and it's difficult to pick out the correct one. But one would hope that developers could at least avoid the obviously terrible ones.
"I tried a more complex password and got the same error message, but after trying with a shorter password, it let me through!" wrote Sameer K.
Octavia inherited a decade old pile of C#, and the code quality was pretty much what one would expect from a decade old pile that hadn't seen any real refactoring: nothing but spaghetti. Worse, it also had an "inner platform" problem, as everything they put in their API could conceivably be called by their customers' own "customizations".
One small block caught her eye, as suspicious:
Skill which you don’t use regularly can get rusty. It might not take too much to get the rust off, and remind yourself of what you’re supposed to be doing, but the process of remembering what you’re supposed to do can get a little… damaging.
Lesli spent a big chunk of her career doing IT for an insurance company. They were a conservative company in a conservative industry, which meant they were still rolling out new mainframes in the early 2000s. “Big iron” was the future for insurance.
Long-lived projects can have… interesting little corners. Choices made 13 years ago can stick around, either because they work well enough, or because, well, every change breaks somebody's workflow.
Today's anonymous submitter was poking around the code base of a large, long-lived JavaScript framework. In a file, not modified since 2007, but still included in the product, they found this function.
Time just flies right past, and before you know it, the holidays will be here. Which is why you had better hurry up and try your hand at giving us the best WTF Christmas Story ever, to help us found a new holiday tradition. Or at least, give us one bright spot in the yawning abyss of 2020.
Can you teach us the true meaning of WTFMas?
Alleen started by digging into a PHP method which was just annoying. _find_shipment_by_object_id would, when it couldn't find the ID, return false, instead of the more expected null. Not terrible, but annoying. Worse, it didn't return the shipment eihter, just a key which could be used to fetch a shipment from an array.
Again, all that's just annoying.
