The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Lint Brush Off

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-28

A few years back, C# added the concept of "primary constructors". Instead of declaring the storage for class members and then initializing them in the constructor, you can annotate the class itself with the required fields, and C# automatically generates a constructor for you. It's all very TypeScript and very Microsoft, and certainly cuts down on some boilerplate.

Esben B's team isn't really using them in many places, but they are using a linter which is opinionated about them. So this in-line constructor causes the linter to complain:

2 comments - Last comment @ 07:22

The JSON Template

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-27

We rip on PHP a lot, but I am willing to admit that the language and ecosystem have evolved over the years. What started as an ugly templating language is now just an ugly regular language.

But what happens when you still really want to do things with templates? Allison has inherited a Python-based, WSGI application which rejects any sort of formal routing or basic web development best practices. Their way of routing requests is simply long chains of "if condition then invokeA elif otherCondition then invokeB". Sometimes, those conditions will directly set the MIME type on the HTTP response.

20 comments - Last comment @ 08:50

Tune Out the Static

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-23

Henrik H (previously) sends us a simple representative C# line:

static void GenerateCommercilaInvoice()

13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-25

Good Etiquette

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-20

"Here, you're a programmer, take this over. It's business critical."

That's what Felicity's boss told her when he pointed her to a network drive containing an Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet contained a pile of macros. The person who wrote it had left, and nobody knew how to make it work, but the macros in question were absolutely business vital.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-23

We'll Hire Better Contractors Next Time, We Promise

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-16

Nona writes: "this is the beginning of a 2100 line function."

That's bad. Nona didn't send us the entire JavaScript function, but sent us just the three early lines, which definitely raise concerns:

14 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-20

Three Letter Acronyms, Four Letter Words

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-15

Candice (previously) has another WTF to share for us.

We're going to start by just looking at one fragment of a class defined in this C++ code: TLAflaList.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-16

Non-cogito Ergo c_str

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-13

Tim (previously) supports a relatively ancient C++ application. And that creates some interesting conundrums, as the way you wrote C++ in 2003 is not the way you would write it even a few years later. The standard matured quickly.

Way back in 2003, it was still common to use C-style strings, instead of the C++ std::string type. It seems silly, but people had Strong Opinions™ about using standard library types, and much of your C++ code was probably interacting with C libraries, so yeah, C-strings stuck around for a long time.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-23

Take a Percentage

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-09

When looking at the source of a major news site, today's anonymous submitter sends us this very, very mild, but also very funny WTF:

	<div class="g-vhs g-videotape g-cinemagraph" id="g-video-178_article_slug-640w"
		 data-type="videotape" data-asset="https://somesite.com/videos/file.mp4" data-cinemagraph="true" data-allow-multiple-players="true"
		 data-vhs-options='{"ratio":"560:320"}'
		 style="padding-bottom: 57.14285714285714%">

19 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-10

Two Conversions

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-08

The father of the "billion dollar mistake" left us last month. His pointer is finally null. Speaking of null handling, Randy says he was "spelunking" through his codebase and found this pair of functions, which handles null.

public String getDataString() {
    if (dataString == null) {
        return Constants.NOT_AVAILABLE;
    }
    return asUnicode(dataString);
}

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-14

Proper Property Validation

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-07

Tim H inherited some code which has objects that have many, many properties properties on them. Which is bad. That clearly has no cohesion. But it's okay, there's a validator function which confirms that object is properly populated.

The conditions and body of the conditionals have been removed, so we can see what the flow of the code looks like.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-09

The Update Route

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-06

Today's anonymous submission is one of the entries where I look at it and go, "Wait, that's totally wrong, that could have never worked." And then I realize, that's why it was submitted: it was absolutely broken code which got to production, somehow.

Collection.updateOne(query, update, function(err, result, next)=>{
if(err) next(err)
...
})

8 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-07

One Case

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-02

I feel like we've gotten a few SQL case statement abuses recently, but a properly bad one continues to tickle me. Ken C sends us one that, well:

SELECT CASE h.DOCUMENTTYPE
        WHEN 2 THEN 3 WHEN 3 THEN 4 WHEN 4 THEN 5
        WHEN 5 THEN 6 WHEN 6 THEN 7 WHEN 7 THEN 8
        ELSE h.DOCUMENTTYPE
    END AS DocumentType,
    h.DOCNMBR AS DocNmbr,
    h.FULLPOLICY AS FullPolicy,
    h.BATCHID AS BatchId,
    h.OrigBatchId,
    h.UPDATEDDATE AS UpdatedDate,
    h.CUSTOMERNO AS CustomerNo,
    h.PROJECTID AS ProjectID,
    h.AMOUNT AS Amount

31 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-07

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