The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Dumbain Specific Language

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-20

I’ve had to write a few domain-specific-languages in the past. As per Remy’s Law of Requirements Gathering, it’s been mostly because the users needed an Excel-like formula language. The danger of DSLs, of course, is that they’re often YAGNI in the extreme, or at least a sign that you don’t really understand your problem.

XML, coupled with schemas, is a tool for building data-focused DSLs. If you have some complex structure, you can convert each of its features into an XML attribute. For example, if you had a grammar that looked something like this:

15 comments - Last comment @ 12:31

Poor Shoe

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2017-09-19

"So there's this developer who is the end-all, be-all try-hard of the year. We call him Shoe. He's the kind of over-engineering idiot that should never be allowed near code. And, to boot, he's super controlling."

35 comments - Last comment @ 08:33

Mutex.js

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-18

Just last week, I was teaching a group of back-end developers how to use Angular to develop front ends. One question that came up, which did suprise me a bit, was how to deal with race conditions and concurrency in JavaScript.

I’m glad they asked, because it’s a good question that never occurred to me. The JavaScript runtime, of course, is single-threaded. You might use Web Workers to get multiple threads, but they use an Actor model, so there’s no shared state, and thus no need for any sort of locking.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

Have it Your Way!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-09-15

"You can have any graphics you want, as long as it's Intel HD Graphics 515," Mark R. writes.

30 comments - Last comment @ 10:45

string isValidArticle(string article)

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-14

Anonymous sends us this little blob of code, which is mildly embarassing on its own:

    static StringBuilder vsb = new StringBuilder();
    internal static string IsValidUrl(string value)
    {
        if (value == null)
        {
            return "\"\"";
        }

        vsb.Length= 0;
        vsb.Append("@\"");

        for (int i=0; i<value.Length; i++)
        {
            if (value[i] == '\"')
                vsb.Append("\"\"");
            else
                vsb.Append(value[i]);
        }

        vsb.Append("\"");
        return vsb.ToString();
    }

38 comments - Last comment @ 09:41

You Absolutely Don't Need It

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2017-09-13

The progenitor of this story prefers to be called Mr. Syntax, perhaps because of the sins his boss committed in the name of attempting to program a spreadsheet-loader so generic that it could handle any potential spreadsheet with any data arranged in any conceivable format.

The boss had this idea that everything should be dynamic, even things that should be relatively straightforward to do, such as doing a web-originated bulk load of data from a spreadsheet into the database. Although only two such spreadsheet formats were in use, the boss wrote it to handle ANY spreadsheet. As you might imagine, this spawned mountains of uncommented and undocumented code to keep things generic. Sin was tasked with locating and fixing the cause of a NullPointerException that should simply never have occurred. There was no stack dump. There were no logs. It was up to Sin to seek out and destroy the problem.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

Cases, Cases, Cases

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2017-09-12

Paul R. shows us a classic example of the sort of case statement that maybe, you know, never should've been implemented as a case statement:

23 comments - Last comment @ 06:04

A Bad Route

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-11

Ah, consumer products. Regardless of what the product in question is, therre’s a certain amount of “design” that goes into the device. Not design which might make the product more user-friendly, or useful, or in any way better. No, “design”, which means it looks nicer on the shelf at Target, or Best Buy, or has a better image on its Amazon listing. The manufacturer wants you to buy it, but they don’t really care if you use it.

This thinking extends to any software that may be on the device. This is obviously true if it’s your basic Internet of Garbage device, but it’s often true of something we depend on far more: consumer grade routers.

41 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Error

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-09-08

Drew W. writes, "If I'm already at (undefined), why should I pay $389.99 to fly to (undefined)?"

25 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

Never Bother the Customer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-07

Matthew H was given a pretty basic task: save some data as a blob. This task was made more complicated by their boss’s core philosophy, though.

Never. Bother. The. Customer..

44 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

No Chemistry

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2017-09-06

Tyler G.’s “engagement manager”, Sheila, had a new gig for him. The Global Chemical Society, GCS, had their annual conference coming up, and their system for distributing the schedules was a set of USB thumb-drives with self-hosting web apps.

“You’ll be working with two GCS representatives, Jeff and Graham,” Sheila explained. “They’ll provide you with last year’s source code, and the data for this year’s schedule. You’ll need to wire them up.”

50 comments - Last comment @ 06:46

Gotta Get 'Em All

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-05

LINQ brings functional programming and loads of syntactic sugar to .NET languages. It’s a nice feature, although as James points out, it helps if your fellow developers have even the slightest clue about what they’re doing.

// some validation checking
var retrieveDocIdList = this.storedDocumentManager.GetAllForClientNotRetrieved(client.Id).Select(x => x.Id.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)).ToList();

retrieveDocIdList.ForEach(id => {
    var storedDoc = this.storedDocumentManager.Get(int.Parse(id))
// do some other stuff with the doc
});

30 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-13

Classic WTF: #include "pascal.h"

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2017-09-04

It's Labor Day in the US, where to honor workers, some people get a day off, but retail stores are open with loads of sales. We're reaching back to the old days of 2004 for this one. -- Remy

Ludwig Von Anon sent in some code from the UI component of a large, multi-platform system he has the pleasure of working on. At first glance, the code didn't seem all too bad ...

procedure SelectFontIntoDC(Integer a) begin
declare fonthandle fh;
if (gRedraw is not false) then begin
   fh = CreateFontIndirect(gDC);
   SelectObject(gDC, fh);
   DeleteObject(fh);
end;
end;

32 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-18

Thresholds Were Made to be Broken

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-09-01

Dima R. wrote, "Running out of space on this old XP machine. I know, I'll just uninstall TurboTax 2014!"