Comment On It's Gonna Be a While

One of Adam Lane's many fun adventures as a consultant was to help out a company that had a large, broken, in-house reporting system. The company's lead programmer had just up and left, leaving a mess of a project that "Visual Basic was having a few problems compiling" and that Adam would have to "clean it up and make it work." A dirty job, but that's why they paid Adam Adam's employer the big bucks. [expand full text]
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Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 09:04 • by Rafael Larios (unregistered)
That is wrothy of vomit... I'm sorry for Ada, noone should be maintaining that piece of crap.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 09:11 • by bodge (unregistered)
Better.... or worse?

At least he got an apology, which is more than most get!



captcha: onomatopeodiasaroaitis (you're kidding, right?)

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 09:23 • by Cable (unregistered)
Hey at least he apologized. I constantly stumble across some total useless bits of code i have to optimize or debug. Well at least it's easy to optimize something like that, let the nirvana deal with it.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 09:29 • by MX5Ringer
Holy Mother of god!!!!!

He must have been paid by the character when he put that line of shite together.

I battle each day against my junior programmers doing things like that.

CAPTCHA: BLEEDING (Like my eyes are now)

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 09:35 • by Welbog
131378 in reply to 131377
It's one thing for our anonymous friends to tell us their captchas, but it's kinda weird when a registered user makes one up like that.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 09:41 • by Anon (unregistered)
It's one thing when stupid first post comments get removed, but it's another when an on-topic post that refers to the article in question is. BTW, my post read (and I was first):
lol!

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 09:48 • by finnn (unregistered)
Could that monster result from auto-generating some stuff and then cut-n-pasting it together?

Whoa, it looks uglier every time I look at it!

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 09:55 • by Zylon
131382 in reply to 131380
Anon:
It's one thing when stupid first post comments get removed, but it's another when an on-topic post that refers to the article in question is. BTW, my post read (and I was first):
lol!

False dichotomy. There is in fact just one rule for post deletion-- Being an idiot.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 10:03 • by SteveG (unregistered)
Usually these are just amusing in their idiocy, like someone driving along with their turn signal on.

This one makes me want to kill somebody, like someone swerving across three occupied lanes of traffic without slowing to hit their exit.

I have code rage. Grrarrr!

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 10:08 • by My eyes! (unregistered)
Where I come from (SE US), "He needed killing" used to be a valid defense. Somebody get a rope.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 10:09 • by zip
131388 in reply to 131382
Zylon:
Anon:
It's one thing when stupid first post comments get removed, but it's another when an on-topic post that refers to the article in question is. BTW, my post read (and I was first):
lol!

False dichotomy. There is in fact just one rule for post deletion-- Being an idiot.


QFT. I can't believe people complain about their worthless and invariably unfunny posts getting deleted.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 10:11 • by akatherder
Yeah it's sloppy. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but it seems very obvious to me what it is doing. Create a bunch of columns, then manipulate data in an array to add a row.

Spacing the insertrow helps quite a bit:


qPrint.Document.InsertRow "tbItem", "", False,
Sp(0),
Sp(1),
Sp(2),
Sp(3),
(val(Sp(1)) + val(Sp(2)) + val(Sp(3))),
Sp(5) & Sp(4),
Sp(7) & Sp(6),
Sp(9) & Sp(8),
Sp(11) & Sp(10),
Sp(13) & Sp(12),
(val(Sp(5)) + val(Sp(7)) + val(Sp(9)) + val(Sp(11)) + val(Sp(13))) & (val(Sp(4)) + val(Sp(6)) + val(Sp(8)) + val(Sp(10)) + val(Sp(12))),
(val(Sp(1)) + val(Sp(2)) + val(Sp(3))) + (val(Sp(4)) + val(Sp(6)) + val(Sp(8)) + val(Sp(10)) + val(Sp(12))),
Sp(0),
Sp(1),
Sp(2),
Sp(3),
(val(Sp(1)) + val(Sp(2)) + val(Sp(3))),
Sp(5) & Sp(4),
Sp(7) & Sp(6),
Sp(9) & Sp(8),
Sp(11) & Sp(10),
Sp(13) & Sp(12),
(val(Sp(5)) + val(Sp(7)) + val(Sp(9)) + val(Sp(11)) + val(Sp(13))) & (val(Sp(4)) + val(Sp(6)) + val(Sp(8)) + val(Sp(10)) + val(Sp(12))),
(val(Sp(1)) + val(Sp(2)) + val(Sp(3))) + (val(Sp(4)) + val(Sp(6)) + val(Sp(8)) + val(Sp(10)) + val(Sp(12)))

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 10:25 • by hung (unregistered)
131393 in reply to 131380
Anon:
It's one thing when stupid first post comments get removed, but it's another when an on-topic post that refers to the article in question is. BTW, my post read (and I was first):
lol!

... and HERE's TO YOU .. Mr. First-Poster-Guy, Bud Light proudly salutes you.. eagerly playing the 'First Comment' game. Mr. First-Poster-Guy - you win today's Post Comment game. Your post was not removed, it was merely moved into an undisclosed location of the web server - the First POST Hall of Fame - congratulations... again, Mr First-Poster-Guy ... we salute you <standing in honor of your well-placed post>.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 10:35 • by Anon (unregistered)
It's like magic numbers but a hundred times more eye bleeding.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 10:36 • by Jax (unregistered)
It's not often that I literally shout out "what the fuck" when looking at these examples.
But today was definately one of those.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 10:37 • by Marek (unregistered)
131398 in reply to 131388
zip:
Zylon:
Anon:
It's one thing when stupid first post comments get removed, but it's another when an on-topic post that refers to the article in question is. BTW, my post read (and I was first):
lol!

False dichotomy. There is in fact just one rule for post deletion-- Being an idiot.


QFT. I can't believe people complain about their worthless and invariably unfunny posts getting deleted.


I'm just amazed that somebody actually bothers to delete posts here...

Captcha: atari (wow. So it's not human, right?)

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 10:58 • by Ohnonymous (unregistered)
The REAL WTF is it took this guy a whole day to figure out one line of code. Granted it is a long line, but it's not that complicated.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 11:00 • by Aron
Didn't we see this one a few months ago?

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 11:00 • by George Nacht (unregistered)
Mother told me to find something good in EVERYTHING. OK, let´s try this one...hmmm..... Yes, I got it.
Good thing abou this is, THIS CAN?T GET ANY WORSE!

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 11:03 • by bonzombiekitty
I like to put apologies and stuff in my comments when I know I coded something rather poorly. For example, in the program I'm coding now, I sorta broke the implied rules for .equals(Object o), wherein a=b, and b=a, but if a=c c may not equal b. I did it to make .indexOf() work a lot easier, rather than having to make my own search algorithm.

My comments:
//I kinda broke the rules for .equals(), sorry.
//I did it to make the code a lot cleaner and easier to understand. so sue me.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 11:04 • by cparker
I should add that, the apology in "avdance" was not for the horribly complicated line that followed.
You spelled "avdanced" wrong. :)

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 11:12 • by CasualMark (unregistered)
WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!!!!!

captcha: atari

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 11:16 • by Jojosh_the_Pi
131409 in reply to 131401
Ohnonymous:
The REAL WTF is it took this guy a whole day to figure out one line of code. Granted it is a long line, but it's not that complicated.


I'm going to give Adam the BOTD. Perhaps he was trying to figure out what that line had to do with the rest of the code, not that the line itself was so complicated.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 11:17 • by Zylon
What do you want to bet that the guy who originally wrote this used to be a COBOL programmer? The obsession with inserting just the right amount of whitespace is the giveaway.

Granted, he may not have been a *good* COBOL programmer...

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 11:18 • by poochner
Jesus Howard Christ. That's just painful.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 11:26 • by JTK (unregistered)
131412 in reply to 131411
poochner:
Jesus Howard Christ. That's just painful.


No, Howard is his dad...

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 11:58 • by jimlangrunner
Sweet Lord. That hurts.

Not that printing the data in columns hurts. It's that some poor bastard has to remember that element 11 carries monthly totals, while column 12 carries current page count, and element 2 carries the number of cars stopped at a stoplight.

Makes me want to cry.

And I don't have a captcha!

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 12:02 • by Uberbandit (unregistered)
Oh! Man I think I broke something in mi jaw while reading the sorry note
Captcha: craaazy, as the comments in code.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 12:06 • by Uberbandit (unregistered)
131422 in reply to 131418
jimlangrunner:
Sweet Lord. That hurts.

Not that printing the data in columns hurts. It's that some poor bastard has to remember that element 11 carries monthly totals, while column 12 carries current page count, and element 2 carries the number of cars stopped at a stoplight.

Makes me want to cry.

And I don't have a captcha!


Yeah! You unlucky registered users without ramdom pieces of wisdom from the window that knows it all... I'm talking about the screen, not about Windows since I like better anything else, so I wasn't doing any publicity... YEAH! Ramdom Wisdom Rulez Baby!

Captcha: riaa baby!!! Read It Ala Americana!!

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 12:27 • by Bill (unregistered)
131427 in reply to 131401
Ohnonymous:
The REAL WTF is it took this guy a whole day to figure out one line of code. Granted it is a long line, but it's not that complicated.


You have ***NO*** idea how much pain and suffering the stored procedure might have caused him while figuring out that one line.

If I had to diagnose that SP Call, I'd start by reading the SP. Given the self-obfuscating nature of this code, God only knows how ugly the SQL was.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 12:32 • by H|B
Code like this reminds me of the old aphorism... "when your routine takes more than 10 parameters, you obviously forgot some".

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 12:46 • by Roman (unregistered)
Yeah, I'm very sorry too, lol.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 13:03 • by kmactane
' to-do: apologize in avdanced to next coder
' very sorry lol


(emphasis added)

Adding "lol" after an apology has a way of making the entire apology sound somewhat less than sincere. In fact, it makes it sound kind of like: "Yeah, I'm so sorry for you, and so sympathetic, that I... umm... can't stop laughing at you, even as I try to claim that I'm sorry! Ha ha ha!"

I agree with the poster who mentioned the "he needed killing" defense. This would have been kinder without the so-called "apology".

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 13:47 • by peon (unregistered)
131456 in reply to 131397
Jax:
It's not often that I literally shout out "what the fuck" when looking at these examples.
But today was definately one of those.

Literally != Actually

// FYI

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 14:07 • by mo (unregistered)
It takes a certain genius to get a compiler to throw hundreds of errors. When I write malfunctioning code it'll throw a couple and refuse to continue, and are subsequently easy to fix because they're as obvious to me as they are to the compiler. Hundreds of errors means there are hundreds of things just a little off, rather than hundreds of blatant typos.
the real wtf=captcha=riaa

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 14:14 • by tommy (unregistered)
that looks just like my code :)

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 14:27 • by RogerC
131467 in reply to 131384
SteveG:
I have code rage. Grrarrr!


Code rage! I love it!

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 14:29 • by phaedrus
131468 in reply to 131403
George Nacht:
Mother told me to find something good in EVERYTHING. OK, let´s try this one...hmmm..... Yes, I got it.
Good thing abou this is, THIS CAN?T GET ANY WORSE!


Don't ever, EVER say that. I can always get worse. I mean, what happens when he opens the next file? Who knows what eldritch monstrosities lurk within? He said he had _hundreds_ of compiler errors to work through... That line looks like it might compile ok...

Oh, and My Eyes! The Goggles Do Nothing!

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 14:35 • by AdT (unregistered)
Just in case anyone is wondering what "Hindenburgesque" could mean:

Paul von Hindenburg (born in 1847) was a Prussian, and later German, military officer and statesman. He preceded Adolf Hitler as the president of Germany until his death in 1934. Internationally, however, his name is probably best known for the Hindenburg disaster, whose indirect namesake he was.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 14:53 • by spaz (unregistered)
131480 in reply to 131456
Peon:
Jax:
It's not often that I literally shout out "what the fuck" when looking at these examples.
But today was definately one of those.
Literally != Actually


It's not often that people literally use literally correctly. While literally does not actually mean actually, Jax means that (s)he most of the time would should out something like "god that's dumb" or "what a completely stupid mistake". This time, jax literally shouted "what the fuck", literally using the word correctly, as opposed to my use of commas.

capcha muhahahaha

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 15:26 • by peon (unregistered)
131487 in reply to 131480
spaz:
Peon:
Jax:
It's not often that I literally shout out "what the fuck" when looking at these examples.
But today was definately one of those.
Literally != Actually


It's not often that people literally use literally correctly. While literally does not actually mean actually, Jax means that (s)he most of the time would should out something like "god that's dumb" or "what a completely stupid mistake". This time, jax literally shouted "what the fuck", literally using the word correctly, as opposed to my use of commas.

But it only makes sense to use "literally" when the expression that follows has a second, figurative, connotation. That way, you tell the reader that you meant to use the expression in the literal sense, instead of the figurative sense, and thereby avoid any ambiguity.

AFAIK, "shout out" has only one meaning. (As a verb, that is; people also use it as a noun.)

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 15:40 • by Logical Fallacy (unregistered)
131493 in reply to 131382
Zylon:
Anon:
It's one thing when stupid first post comments get removed, but it's another when an on-topic post that refers to the article in question is. BTW, my post read (and I was first):
lol!

False dichotomy. There is in fact just one rule for post deletion-- Being an idiot.


You don't know what a false dichotomy is. Idiot.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 15:43 • by VGR
Maybe he was apologizing for hard-coding the Arial font into a user interface.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 15:44 • by rgz (unregistered)
131495 in reply to 131487
peon:
spaz:
Peon:
Jax:
It's not often that I literally shout out "what the fuck" when looking at these examples.
But today was definately one of those.
Literally != Actually


It's not often that people literally use literally correctly. While literally does not actually mean actually, Jax means that (s)he most of the time would should out something like "god that's dumb" or "what a completely stupid mistake". This time, jax literally shouted "what the fuck", literally using the word correctly, as opposed to my use of commas.

But it only makes sense to use "literally" when the expression that follows has a second, figurative, connotation. That way, you tell the reader that you meant to use the expression in the literal sense, instead of the figurative sense, and thereby avoid any ambiguity.

AFAIK, "shout out" has only one meaning. (As a verb, that is; people also use it as a noun.)


Not necessarily, there is another situation where it makes sense to use "literally" and that is when reporting speech. For example, I can tell you that she said that she had never seen code so bad, but literally she said "This is the crappiest code I've ever seen!"

We know not just that Jax shouted out "what the fuck", we also know that those were his exacts words rather than "Worse Than Failure!" which is what we know Alex shouts when Grandma is around :)

I'm not even gonna tell you my CAPTCHA!

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 15:48 • by Theo (unregistered)
131496 in reply to 131493
Logical Fallacy:
Zylon:
Anon:
It's one thing when stupid first post comments get removed, but it's another when an on-topic post that refers to the article in question is. BTW, my post read (and I was first):
lol!

False dichotomy. There is in fact just one rule for post deletion-- Being an idiot.


You don't know what a false dichotomy is. Idiot.

Calling people idiots for that reason may qualify you for that prize too.

(and that can continue for a while)

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 16:44 • by marvin_rabbit
The Original Poster:

Hindenburgesque

New favorite word!

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 17:31 • by Zylon
131519 in reply to 131487
peon:
But it only makes sense to use "literally" when the expression that follows has a second, figurative, connotation. That way, you tell the reader that you meant to use the expression in the literal sense, instead of the figurative sense, and thereby avoid any ambiguity.

For the love of god, shut up already. Using "literally" when there's no possible figurative interpretation doesn't make it incorrect, it just makes it redundant. Best-case, one could consider it acting loosely as an intensifier.

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 18:42 • by chrismcb
131528 in reply to 131375
bodge:
Better.... or worse?

At least he got an apology, which is more than most get!



captcha: onomatopeodiasaroaitis (you're kidding, right?)

Not a very sincere apology though
lol

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 18:49 • by chrismcb
131532 in reply to 131405
bonzombiekitty:
I like to put apologies and stuff in my comments when I know I coded something rather poorly. For example, in the program I'm coding now, I sorta broke the implied rules for .equals(Object o), wherein a=b, and b=a, but if a=c c may not equal b. I did it to make .indexOf() work a lot easier, rather than having to make my own search algorithm.

My comments:
//I kinda broke the rules for .equals(), sorry.
//I did it to make the code a lot cleaner and easier to understand. so sue me.

WTF? How is a.equals(b) == TRUE and b.equals(a) == TRUE and a.equals(c) == TRUE and b.equals(c) == FALSE EASIER to UNDERSTAND?
What kind of ball of bullswax did you drip over your "clean" .equals to make this hellspawn work?
And you didn't just "kinda" break anything. Maybe you should change it to a.kindaequals(b).
What do you do, return filenotfound?

Re: It's Gonna Be a While

2007-04-11 18:59 • by chrismcb
131536 in reply to 131389
akatherder:
Yeah it's sloppy. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but it seems very obvious to me what it is doing. Create a bunch of columns, then manipulate data in an array to add a row.

Spacing the insertrow helps quite a bit:


qPrint.Document.InsertRow "tbItem", "", False,
Sp(0),
Sp(1),
Sp(2),
Sp(3),
(val(Sp(1)) + val(Sp(2)) + val(Sp(3))),
Sp(5) & Sp(4),
Sp(7) & Sp(6),
Sp(9) & Sp(8),
Sp(11) & Sp(10),
Sp(13) & Sp(12),
(val(Sp(5)) + val(Sp(7)) + val(Sp(9)) + val(Sp(11)) + val(Sp(13))) & (val(Sp(4)) + val(Sp(6)) + val(Sp(8)) + val(Sp(10)) + val(Sp(12))),
(val(Sp(1)) + val(Sp(2)) + val(Sp(3))) + (val(Sp(4)) + val(Sp(6)) + val(Sp(8)) + val(Sp(10)) + val(Sp(12))),
Sp(0),
Sp(1),
Sp(2),
Sp(3),
(val(Sp(1)) + val(Sp(2)) + val(Sp(3))),
Sp(5) & Sp(4),
Sp(7) & Sp(6),
Sp(9) & Sp(8),
Sp(11) & Sp(10),
Sp(13) & Sp(12),
(val(Sp(5)) + val(Sp(7)) + val(Sp(9)) + val(Sp(11)) + val(Sp(13))) & (val(Sp(4)) + val(Sp(6)) + val(Sp(8)) + val(Sp(10)) + val(Sp(12))),
(val(Sp(1)) + val(Sp(2)) + val(Sp(3))) + (val(Sp(4)) + val(Sp(6)) + val(Sp(8)) + val(Sp(10)) + val(Sp(12)))


Ohhh WOW! THANKS, thats perfectly clear now! I understand exactly.
Before I thought it was just a bunch of Sp(x)'s now I see... I see that... its just a bunch of Sp(x)'s...

On another note, I don't understand the comment "completely useless." Does that mean the line of code can just be deleted? I don't have a clue what the code is doing, but surely it is at LEAST inserting a row.
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