Comment On The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

If you haven't yet gotten your fill of vampires, jack-o-lanterns, and haunted houses in this Halloween season, then you are in for a treat. Over the past few months, we've all seen some some rather ... unique ... ways of doing various things, programming and otherwise. But today is different. Today, we will see what only Nikolay Simeonov and a few other brave souls have seen. We will see the abomination whose mere thought would send many programmers into the accounting profession. Yes, today's post will contain a glimpse of the reservation system from the Styx (the river, not everyone's favorite 80's band) Motel itself ... [expand full text]
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The second image

2004-10-28 14:38 • by arty
What ... is ... the second image?

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 14:42 • by Stephen Caldwell
I believe this should get it's own post category: Holy Christ on a Crutch.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-29 11:57 • by Mike R.
After staring at this in shock and horror. I have to wonder: What does this thing look like at runtime?

It does appear to be some sort of time table. But, certainly there are better ways of doing this...

How do people get away with [mis]designing things like this?

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-29 16:20 • by icelava
Guayo, you _will_ be saying "WTF" if _you_ are the one assigned to take over the system.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-29 18:01 • by AAYM
> As for Styx being 70s or 80s, it depends whether your teen years were spent blasting Pieces of Eight on the 8-track (Renegade was de rigeur) or Kilroy Was Here (Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto) on the cassette.

They're a 70s band since "Come Sail Away" and "Lorelei" and most of their biggest hits came from that decade. I remember riding the bus to 6th grade hearing "Light Up And Be Happy" blaring over the radio! That was 1974!

By the 80s they were somewhat in decline. Mr. Roboto et al were funny, but lacking the grandeur of their previous work.

Po8 was my favorite!

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 14:51 • by Lore Weaver
Owww my brain!

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 14:52 • by necroyeti
@G Dawg:
yeah, but this looks like all forms of the app are combined together to a single form, which is hardly maintainable. And using names that refer to the documentation shouldn't stop one from using self-documenting names.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 14:52 • by Ricardo Antunes da Costa
Wow! Note to Self: Remember to pray tonight so I never have to face a monster like that in my life.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 14:55 • by David Grant
At least H3000 kinda sounds cool.

Nietzche was right

2004-10-28 14:59 • by Dave Mays
Life *is* pain. At least, it is if you have to maintain a gottschrecklich piece of software like that one.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 15:03 • by Guayo
And this is a WTF because...?
Ok the forms names aren't descriptive, that's not good but a WTF? (I don't understand German' descriptive names so maybe no seeing this as a full-blown WTF is biased).
It seems to be a lot of forms, is this the WTF?
The form shown looks complex, it seems to show on screen the data (reservations?) of a date period (maybe a report would be better) but I don't know the requirements so how we can dispute the design shown?
Yes... the screenshots hints what could be a maintenance nightmare... life is hard get used to it... plus I guess they give you money, isn't it? So what's the big deal?
Ok... maybe I'm just too cynic today.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 15:12 • by Mike R.
> At least H3000 kinda sounds cool.

Hmm, That could be short for HAL 3000. The precursor to HAL 9000 ;)

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 15:23 • by Shane
I'm in agreement with Guayo.. I don't see how this is 'From Hell' just looks overly complicated with some bad naming conventions?

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 15:25 • by mrchips_rsm
I would have to say that this form is most definitely "uberbucht!"...

I think I'm gonna save this image and make it my wallpaper. ;-)

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 15:28 • by Adam G.
SWEET JESUS!

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 15:32 • by skicow
I don't know about anyone else but:

OverlyComplicated + BadNamingConventions == HELL

To me.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 15:34 • by An Angry Young Man
Styx is most definitely a 70s band, not an 80s band.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 15:37 • by Jake Vinson
Actually, this is a good implementation if you take into consideration...

HA! Just kidding. Who's going to be the first douche to defend this code?

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 15:40 • by Jason
Guayo and Shane -> If you had to maintain this, I bet that you'd completely agree that it was indeed 'From Hell'.
I'd quit, and get a real programming job if someone handed this to me to maintain and/or extend.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 15:41 • by Tim Cartwright
Alex, you forgot to compare it to this oldie, but still a goodie :
http://thedailywtf.com/archive/2004/06/02/188.aspx

Although it looks like he has overhauled the interface :

http://www.georgegabrielhara.org/ideas/filematrix/index.htm

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 16:07 • by rs
Haven't seen anything like this since I stopped droppin acid! Oh, the colors!!! Damn, now I'm hungry.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 16:16 • by Sean Kleinjung
I went ahead and made that my wallpaper...I've already noticed a few managers who, after seeing that on my second monitor decided not to bother me because I seemed so busy...

Hah!

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 16:29 • by Kylector
This is from hell, there is no justification. Who in their right mind would stick up for this guy? Yeah you/we get paid to maintain and fix stuff, no matter how crappy...but that doesn't mean the code isn't from hell sometimes!

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 16:32 • by Guayo
Yes... the GUI looks very complex... I'm not sure what's its purpose or how it works, I'm just not keen to criticise something I don't understand... Yes I know there are GUI design guidelines and I'm pretty sure a simpler GUI design would work here. However I don't know what this form does not what the requirements are.
I'm not 100% sure about this design being more complex than it should be.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 16:48 • by Anderson
Scheiße!!!!

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 17:06 • by Peter
Wow, I better not look at tomorrow's addition with my remaining eye.

My closest approximation was a form with like 150 unbound fields spread out over about 10 tabs (this is a doctor, here is the address info, billing info, etc). But that was a mutant lavaflow that started as access2.0 (several years before I started there) and was a combo of access97/sql7 when I left. If you have thousands to millions of records, you can only use unbound forms if you want your form to load before the sun turns into a lump of coal.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 17:16 • by Brian Scott
Jason, I agree. I would quit and get a better programming gig if someone insisted I do ANYTHING to this turd.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 17:25 • by Stan Rogers
There is absolutely no way to justify defending that. Jesus wept. And so do I.

As for Styx being 70s or 80s, it depends whether your teen years were spent blasting Pieces of Eight on the 8-track (Renegade was de rigeur) or Kilroy Was Here (Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto) on the cassette.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 17:46 • by Nikolay Simeonov
> What ... is ... the second image?

you can't guess - that's a form with million of controls that are shown or hidden at runtime and moved all around to indicate whether a room is occupied, booked or free for the day and whom it belongs (whatever you can see from the name, tooltips were not used anywhere)...

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 17:48 • by Kayaman
Are the people who defend these the same people who write these?

I mean come on..."it's not so bad, if you don't consider the blahblahblah" yes it's bad. It's horrible! Your computer can do a lot of things, why force it to do that?

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 17:53 • by Nikolay Simeonov
> There is absolutely no way to justify defending that.

wait until I show you the code :)

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 18:00 • by mistkerl
You don't have a timetable control inside access, so the programmer used textboxes (?) to show the state of the rooms at each day.
I think that their attributes like position, backcolour etc is set at runtime. They have to be unbound.
I hope that no programmer does that work by hand but that the form is generated at runtime.
This would explain the strange form names too.

Great work.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 18:11 • by catscratch
Get a room!!

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 18:16 • by Stan Rogers
Well, let's just say that I don't have access to ANY of that stuff when I design for Lotus Notes, not even non-modal sized windows, and I can build an interactive Gantt-style chart for the Notes client with 96% less WTF-ness than this thing has. I'm no MS Access guru, but the very laws of Nature demand that there is a better way. Forget about "proper environments" for a moment -- you can do better than that in VBA using a CSV file for the reservation data. I say again -- there is absolutely no way to justify defending that.

And I really can't wait to see the code ;o)

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 18:55 • by Raymond Lewallen
Again, just batshit fucking loco right there.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-28 20:01 • by peter beaguely
i see no problem with this code. props to the h3000 dawgs.

stop!

2004-10-28 20:48 • by jonesy
What gives you the right to question the WTFness of WTFs?? You don't OWN the WTF concept, man.

I'm looking at you Guayo, Shane :)

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-29 01:53 • by Gene Hamilton
I really don't know how the code is going to top that second image.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-29 03:45 • by SirRusty
I've got it!! If you stare it for ages, you can eventually see a picture of jesus.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-29 04:58 • by Thygrrr
SHRIEEEEEEEEEEK!

The form thingy with the unbound thingys is scary. Happy Halloween!

(I don't even want to see the code.. is he really committing every field "by hand"? painful...)

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-29 06:47 • by Zka
Omfg! :D Is this supposed to be an user interface? This is a good reason for a suicide IMHO.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-29 07:29 • by hostile17
I don't understand this for a moment, but what I do understand is those scrollbars.

The stuff visible in the illustration is only about a third of the actual stuff in the app, right?

You're Too Cool

2004-10-29 09:26 • by smartypants
It's so manly when programmers curse in postings. You tha man dawg! YOU THA MAN.

re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2004-10-29 10:31 • by Guayo
@jonesy
You know jonesy, the whole WTF concept thing is a little complex, and as you have already proved your fear for complex things, I'll try to explain it to you the simpler I can, here we go:
Yes... I (an only I) own the WTF concept. You don't like it? You don't agree? Does this shock you?...
I couldn't care less, so go on, post a reply, post this is a WTF, that is WTF, WTF with this guy,... that doesn't change a thing, I OWN the WTF concept!
I hope this wasn't too complex (and frightening) to you. ;)

Re: The Hotel (reservation system) From Hell

2010-03-02 07:27 • by mussodrk (unregistered)
True German philosophy : hard working, dedication, passion ,patience, details obsession, optimized naming and work-flows.
And it works really great with auto industry.
Too bad Germans insist on making software.

There are rumors that the German tax system is the most complex in the world... I wonder why...
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