Comment On Payback Is Hell

Well, redo from start...



The real WTF is of course the manager who paid this "seasoned veteran
of a programmer" to write this garbage. Just shows that an idiot
manager will hire an idiot programmer to write idiotic code. Sooner or
later one of them gets replaced by a non-idiot and then everything
falls apart. What a waste of money. They could have used that cash to
support the Tsunami victims in Asia if they were looking for a good use
for it...

Table names like this are one of my biggest pet peeves. 



Strangely, they also find their way into some rather heavily used
commercial software.  When I first saw table names like C_C_C and
S_R, I was quickly reminded of table names in Microsoft's Great Plains
accounting software.  Here's a small sample of table names used by
them:



UPRA0100

SY02800U

POP10110

IVR50000

AHROR012

CM20300

UPR10309

SOP10107

MPW10000



Maybe both databases were engineered by the same 'veteran' ?

Gone are those days when ppl used to think that bits and bytes consume memory.

These table names are quite likely the result of migration of software from operating systems that only allowed 8 character file names.

I don't think the lead WTF was migrated from a system that only allowed 1 character names. [:)]

:

Table names like this are one of my biggest pet peeves. 

Strangely, they also find their way into some rather heavily used commercial software.  When I first saw table names like C_C_C and S_R, I was quickly reminded of table names in Microsoft's Great Plains accounting software.  Here's a small sample of table names used by them:

UPRA0100
SY02800U
POP10110
IVR50000
AHROR012
CM20300
UPR10309
SOP10107
MPW10000

Maybe both databases were engineered by the same 'veteran' ?

> Well, redo from start...

>

> The real WTF is of course the manager who paid this "seasoned veteran
of a programmer" to write this

> garbage. Just shows that an idiot
manager will hire an idiot programmer to write idiotic code. Sooner or

> later one of them gets replaced by a non-idiot and then everything
falls apart. What a waste of money.

> They could have used that cash to
support the Tsunami victims in Asia if they were looking for a good

> use
for it...



Wow you are right. From now on I am going to write better code and then
pass the savings on to victims of future natural disasters.

Wow, usually when I see stuff on this site I immediately think of how bad the code is.  The first thing I thought of with this one is sympathy.  Man, that has to suck hardcore to deal with.  Cruel and unusual punishment.

That's why I say programmers != developers != engineers

:

> Well, redo from start...
>
> The real WTF is of course the manager who paid this "seasoned veteran of a programmer" to write this
> garbage. Just shows that an idiot manager will hire an idiot programmer to write idiotic code. Sooner or
> later one of them gets replaced by a non-idiot and then everything falls apart. What a waste of money.
> They could have used that cash to support the Tsunami victims in Asia if they were looking for a good
> use for it...

Wow you are right. From now on I am going to write better code and then pass the savings on to victims of future natural disasters.

I'm pretty sure Katja meant that instead of wasting all the money they spent to hire a 'seasoned veteran programmer' to write this original app they could have hired someone who knew WTF they were doing and saved a bunch of money in the process....and a good thing to do with our extra money right now would be to help out the people of Asia with it.

As for the WTF, damn! I agree with what was posted earlier; the first time I saw this WTF I felt sorry for the guy who inherited it!

 

Dude,



I don't know what you did in your previous life, but it must have been something terrible..

We all know that webprogramming and database programming is second-class programming, so what do you expect?

What other types of programming are there? Are you saying Mainframe programming is first-class? WTF

Say this out loud while clicking your heals together: "Don't feed the trolls."

Let us observe a moment of silence for the fallen of southeast Asia and the poor, poor programmer who has inherited this.

josh:

Say this out loud while clicking your heals together: "Don't feed the trolls."

Josh: What is a "troll"? Seriously. I've heard this terminology before but never really understood what it meant.

"troll", as in someone who is trolling to pick a "fight".

all this time i thought one letter naming conventions were reserved for views.  i recently ran across a view that was built like an earlier WTF (selecting all from 25 different tables) and named like this

TableName as t_n, People as g, People_1 as h, etc.

WhereTF do you get g from People??

Gone are those days when 1/2 a megabyte of RAM cost $2000.  Gone
are those days when C was a productive way to code large
applications.  Gone are those days when it was considered to be an
effective use of a programmer's time to primarily
(re-re-re...)implement memory management, buffer bounds checking and
variable type
checking as part of the operating algorithms of the software they're
writing.  Gone are those days when a company employs a programmer
to build and then maintain an application, knowing it inside and
out.  Gone are the days when a company will allocate money for
program-level documentation as part of the application development
process.  Gone are those days when "ppl" used "ppl" instead of
"people" to say "people".  Gone are those days when a developer
can be reasonably sure that the app they're maintaining was written by
someone who speaks and writes the same language as them.

:

"troll", as in someone who is trolling to pick a "fight".

??? The way you say that is like I should have known that fact. I'm curious, are all trolls combatative in nature? Are they always "on the attack"? Most of the fantasy films I've seen portray them as fun-loving, amicable creatures, capable of great friendship.

Maybe the word your looking for is Orc. In most fantasy films/games these creatures are combatative in nature. They will indeed attack you. No provocation necessary.

Next time use Orc instead of Troll.

:

"troll", as in someone who is trolling to pick a "fight".

Yep, and "Don't feed the trolls" means to ignore the trolls because if you respond to them you let them know that their comments are getting recognized and they will in turn add more troll comments to this thread until it becomes a flame war.

 

Or read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll

Any chance these table names are obfuscated?



I'd be willing to bet that's why Microsoft Great Plains tables look
like that... to make it harder to reverse-engineer the backend of the
system.

Ouch! [:'(]

But we will all probably see something this bad one day...

"Seasoned veterans" are typically too old to have taken a software engineering course. Or even a database design course...

"Seasoned veterans" are usually older than transistors.  Or at least ICs.

Rational do the same with their products - I had the misfortune of
looking at Rational ClearQuest (their defect tracking system) - we
installed it on SQL Server, I had to go the 'backend' (always makes me
chuckle) and make some changes - boy was I in for a rough ride.



I asked their tech support why the tables and columns were so screwy
and unintuitive - his reply was to make reverse engineering 'difficult'
- so, does that mean they have a tool to make it all look right?

:

Rational do the same with their products - I had the misfortune of
looking at Rational ClearQuest (their defect tracking system) - we
installed it on SQL Server, I had to go the 'backend' (always makes me
chuckle) and make some changes - boy was I in for a rough ride.



I asked their tech support why the tables and columns were so screwy
and unintuitive - his reply was to make reverse engineering 'difficult'
- so, does that mean they have a tool to make it all look right?

Probably not a "tool", but I'll bet they have some views that translate them into something more readable.

:

Dude,

I don't know what you did in your previous life, but it must have been something terrible..

Then I should have been a mass murder or even worse for having to deal with this one: (part 1) http://www.thedailywtf.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=25041  (part 2) http://www.thedailywtf.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=25086

:

Also, the main intellectual force behind the design of this application was a supposedly seasoned veteran of a programmer.

Perhaps this seasoned veteran had the same teacher as the one who wrote the hotel program I had to deal with. On Error Resume Next was everywhere in the hotel program too.

"Seasoned" engineers, hm? Well, seasoned with WHAT? Tabasco sauce?

:

What other types of programming are there? Are you saying Mainframe programming is first-class? WTF

That line made my day.[:D]

On Error Return next

My favorite way to sweep all errors under the rug! [:D]

 

I'm the S to the H to the A to the N to the I to the C to the E but all my friends call me little miss Queen B.

Seen the professional? Well I can clean.

 

gente is spanish for people, so that's how you could name the people column 'g'.

This made me look at a bit of code I have laying. It doesn't use these
kind of weird table names, but it does use things like this:

<pre>

Private Sub Button45_Click()

</pre>

Well, that makes totally clear what button is being pushed, and what this method is doing....not!

F8less:

This made me look at a bit of code I have laying. It doesn't use these kind of weird table names, but it does use things like this:

Private Sub Button45_Click()

Well, that makes totally clear what button is being pushed, and what this method is doing....not!

Real Men Don't Rename Controls!

I have to deal with that sort of rubbish all day long -- people drop controls on to a form, knock up a bit of code, and then ask me to fix it because it doesn't work; what would be a two minute fix if they'd named things sensibly (or possibly not need fixing at all) usually turns in to hours of trying to dechipher what the heck OptionButton13 is...

VBA is a scourge!

<:o)|-)^o)Cip

I'm not trying to troll, just what do you expect?



About the second class thing, ofcause if you coded a DBMS or a
PHP-system that's cool ofcause, but fiddeling with some SQL and stuff,
won't give you much respect. So maybe we agree after all. Hope to see
more intersting WTF's in the future.



Ok, i'm not orcing so i won't reply to this thread anymore. [:#]

Alex Papadimoulis:

Also, the main intellectual force behind the design of this application was a supposedly seasoned veteran of a programmer.

Of course they were seasoned - only a true veteran could have devised such a scheme for future maintenance work / job security.

reminds me of when I was supporting ObjectVision (anyone? anyone?) and if you wanted your tables to be BTrieve (anyone? anyone?), the names they gave to the tables were -random numbers-.

I was told something to the effect that that's the way the BTrieve engine did it, but I find that awfully hard to believe. The product didn't let you change the names either.

now that we're running web services on our as/400 systems, I have to learn a whole new naming convention, and to me, the names of "tables" (files) and "columns" (fields) don't make any sense at all and look like the example posted (without underscores).

That as400 is a different world for me (not DB2).

?????:

gente is spanish for people, so that's how you could name the people column 'g'.

Maybe it's Italian or French!  You ever think of THAT!?!?!

[:P][:D] with Love,
Goudinov

:

wrote:

"troll", as in someone who is trolling to pick a "fight".

??? The way you say that is like I should have known that fact. I'm curious, are all trolls combatative in nature? Are they always "on the attack"? Most of the fantasy films I've seen portray them as fun-loving, amicable creatures, capable of great friendship.

Maybe the word your looking for is Orc. In most fantasy films/games these creatures are combatative in nature. They will indeed attack you. No provocation necessary.

Next time use Orc instead of Troll.

I think the fantasy novel that best describes the behaviour of trolls in usenet and web forums is The Hobbit… if you read that you will see that calling them trolls is perfect.

 

What's truly sad about this code is that it makes One2Pt20462262185th look good. 

Hear, hear. At least you could tell what was stored in the variable, even if you didn't know what it was for.

Clearly the designer of the db schema had the programmers in mind when picking the object names. You know how long those SQL queries can be with full descriptive names, we end up using alias (stupid workaround) but that would be unnecessary if names like these were used.

Non only is faster to type SQL but is less error prone (when you type less there is less chance to put bugs in the code).

Overall It's a win-win design decision (witch is highly remarkable).

A favorite of mine is a C++ object I found in a product I used to work on called 'CNewThing'.

I was made redundanct from that job suspiciously soon after I emailed round this link:

http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html

I was only trying to help.

Actually, 'troll' used to mean someone who trolls. As in fishing, and nothing to do with those nasty creatures from Tolkien and elsewhere. A troll was someone who went onto a newsgroup or a mailing list with inflamatory remarks, trying to catch someone who would take him seriously and get a flame war going.

Free:

I'm the S to the H to the A to the N to the I to the C to the E but all my friends call me little miss Queen B.

Was Shanice the singer that had the 1990 hit "Smile"? You know, "I like your smile...psyche!" Remember that?

Bellinghman:

Actually, 'troll' used to mean someone who trolls. As in fishing, and nothing to do with those nasty creatures from Tolkien and elsewhere. A troll was someone who went onto a newsgroup or a mailing list with inflamatory remarks, trying to catch someone who would take him seriously and get a flame war going.

Face facts. A troll is a benign fantasy character. The creature you should be referencing is an ORC! Trust me on this. I know.

:

Bellinghman wrote:

Actually, 'troll' used to mean someone who trolls. As in fishing, and nothing to do with those nasty creatures from Tolkien and elsewhere. A troll was someone who went onto a newsgroup or a mailing list with inflamatory remarks, trying to catch someone who would take him seriously and get a flame war going.

Face facts. A troll is a benign fantasy character. The creature you should be referencing is an ORC! Trust me on this. I know.

Speechless Blue? You know I'm right. [;)]

Damn quoting function.



What I said was:



"A troll about trolls.  How quaint!"



:P