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Dave L. writes, "Spotted an option on Lenovo's 'Pick Your Laptop by Spec' that seems to be aimed, possibly, at the less than experienced laptop buyer."
Let’s say you’re a native English speaker. Let’s say you’re writing a library which is going to be used by Czech speakers, like our submitter Jan Krynický. You’ve been told to make sure the code is usuable by them, so you decided to use C#’s annotations to provide Czech documentation of various fields.
There’s just one problem: you don’t know Czech. You know enough to know that the Czech equivalent of “-ed”, as in “uploaded” is “-ováno”, so “uploadováno” seems perfectly reasonable to you. Czech documentation, done. It might not be the best choice, but they'll get the point.
Thomas K was browsing around, trying to give folks some technical help. While doing that, he found a poor, belaguered soul who had been given a task: convert some Java code to Python.
This was the code:
Most of our WTFs are produced on modern hardware, but today we're taking you back to the dawn of computing, back to the 1960s, when our submitter, Robert, was in college. Rob was taking a class in Numerical Analysis, which allowed people to submit their programs to the university computer (singular, as this was before computers were cheap enough to have a whole lab of 30+ of them just lying around for students). This involved using a keypunch machine to punch cards to run a FORTRAN program that might give you the answers to your homework. It was marginally faster than using a slide rule, until you factored in that students had low priority on the queue to submit their programs to be run, so they'd have to wait hours, if not days, to get access. Most students didn't even bother with the expensive machine, simply doing their maths the old-fashioned way and leaving it at that.
Eyal N works on some code which relies on "bit matrices": 2D arrays of bits. Since they are working in C, in practice this means that they have one giant array of bytes and methods to handle getting and setting specific entries in the matrix.
One day, Eyal sat down to do a remote pair-programming session with a co-worker. It started out alright, but the hours ticked by, the problem they were dealing with kept showing thornier and thornier edge cases, and instead of calling it a day, they worked late into the night.
"Apparently they don't want you to Strongly Agree with everything they say!" wrote David S.
If there’s a hell for programmers, it probably involves C-style strings on some level. C’s approach to strings is rooted in arrays, and arrays are rooted in pointers, and now suddenly everything is memory manipulation, and incautious printf and memcpy commands cause buffer overruns. I'm oversimplifying and leaving out some of the better libraries that make this less painful, but the roots remain the same.
Fortunately, most of the time, we’re not working with that sort of string representation. If you’re using a high-level language, like Java, you get all sorts of perks, like abstract string methods, no concerns about null termination, and immutability by default.
Generating SQL statements is a necessary feature of many applications. String concatenation is the most obvious, and also the most wrong way to do this. Most APIs these days offer a way to construct SQL statements out of higher-level abstractions, whether we’re talking about .NET’s LINQ, or the QueryBuilder objects in many languages.
But let’s say you’re doing string concatenation. This means you need to have lots of literals in your code. And literal values, as we know, are bad. So we need to avoid these magic values by storing them in variables.
