"The Colonial" was trawling through some code they inherited, and found this approach to doing exceptions in C#:

public enum ReturnCode : int
{
      Success                                         = 0,

        Enum1                     = 100,
  Enum2          = 110,

   // *snip* - LOTS of enums
     // .
    // .
   
    UnknownError               = 998,
      Exception                  = 999
};

As a native English speaker, I've inherited a very chaotic perspective on language: "correct" language is defined by usage, loan words are less "loaned" and more like the mandolin someone lent me 20 years ago- mine now. New words can be ginned up on the fly, and parts of speech are just a suggestion.

Many other languages don't take this approach. French, for example, is defined by the Académie Française. There is a standard, and officially correct way to use French. In programming terms, we could say that French is C, while English is Perl.

We've already picked on bad logging code this week, but we haven't picked on PHP in awhile, so let's look at some bad PHP logging code, from Kris.

        $path = self::getPath();

        if (file_exists($path)) {
            $content = file_get_contents($path);
        } else {
            $content = "";
        }
        $content .= "\n" . date('Y-m-d H:i') . " | " . $message;
        file_put_contents($path, $content);

Strings in C remain hard. They're complicated- they're complicated because of null termination, they're complicated because of memory management, they're complicated because of the behaviors of const. There's a lot going on in C strings.

But Alice had a simple case: convert a true or false value into the string "true" or "false". Let's see how her co-worker solved this:

The list of things never to write yourself contains some obvious stars: don't write your own date handling, your own encryption, your own authentication/authorization. It's not that no one should write these things, it's that these domains all are very complicated, require a great deal of specialized knowledge, and while easy to get almost correct, they're nearly impossible to get actually correct. If you embark on these tasks, it's because you want to create a product that solves these problems, hopefully not because you've got a terminal case of NIH syndrome.

While it's not as big a star on the list, another domain you probably shouldn't try and solve yourself is logging. Today's anonymous submission isn't the worst home-grown logging I can imagine, but it's got enough bad choices in it to merit some analysis.

Sami inherited some C# LINQ code. The actual behavior and purpose of this code is fairly simple. The way the code was written, however, well…

foreach (var operatingMode in ahu.CalculationData.OperatingModes) { operatingModesModel.OperatingModeNames.Add
(operatingModeNumber, operatingMode.OperatingModeName); var 
innerOperatingModeNumber = operatingModeNumber; foreach (var 
property in from partData in operatingMode.PartDatas.Where(p 
=> p.PartGuid == partGuid) let finalOperatingModeNumber = 
innerOperatingModeNumber from property in (from resultProperty 
in this.GetProperties(partData).Where(p => 
FilterAcceptNonSoundAndNonImageProperties(p, updateResult.For
(partData)) && (propertyFilterFunction?.Invoke(partData, p) ?? 
true)).ToList() let measurementUnit = resultProperty.Type.
GetPresentationMeasurementUnit(measurementUnits) let 
measurementUnitTranslationId = measurementUnit?.TextId select 
new OperatingModesModel.OperatingModePropertyModel
(finalOperatingModeNumber, this.TranslationService.
GetTranslator(this.Language.Code).Translate(resultProperty.
Type.NameId), this.PrintoutUtil.GetValueString(resultProperty, 
measurementUnit, this.Language), string.IsNullOrEmpty
(measurementUnitTranslationId) ? "-" : this.TranslationService.
GetTranslator(this.Language.Code).Translate
(measurementUnitTranslationId), resultProperty.Key)) select 
property) { operatingModesModel.OperatingModeProperties.Add
(property); } operatingModeNumber++; }