Daniel Rivera writes with a short but effective snippet. The company he works for purchased a JAVA "Application" developed offshore. The decision to purchase this software was made based solely on a PowerPoint demo given to the CEO.

Now in this particular JAVA example, a method called someMethod ( Integer someInt ) needs to be called with a given hard-coded primitive value like 0. One way of calling someMethod might look like this:

Integer x = 0;

someMethod(x);

In this application, the way to call someMethod looks more like this:

int x = new Integer( 0 ).intValue();

someMethod( new Integer( x ) );

In short, a programmer wrapped the 0 in an Integer object. Next, they called intValue on that object to extract a primitive int. Finally, they call someMethod with yet another new Integer object, created using the same primitive int. To add insult to injury, the original programmers would blame Daniel and company whenever something went wrong because they "touched" (fixed) the original code.

Editor's note:Is this practice of wrapping/unwrapping variables being derived from languages that lack strong variable types, such as VBScript, or is it a complete misunderstanding of how variables and functions work?

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!