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File path separators are a common pain point when writing cross platform software. Of course, not every programming language has a graceful API for handling that. For example, prior to C++ 17, you had to do some #ifdef preprocessor magic to handle that. Which people usually did (or they'd use the Boost suite of libraries).
Code like this wouldn't be out of place or incorrect:
First up this week is a little story about a fifafail. I do wonder if this was a failure of the television station, or whether there was something more to it than that.
Hercules wrote to alert us to these World Cup shenanigans, explaing "At least the flags were correct. And yes, this was live TV. The host got the country names correctly, and even called out that the written text was wrong"
When Gary was called in for a meeting with a few of his managers- because of course he had several- he thought it was going to be for an "attaboy", because things had been going really well for the past few months.
Gary had inherited a mess, and taken over a nightmare application. It was the kind of application that should be a simple CRUD-style data-driven app, but somehow despite only having 20ish entities it managed, someone had generated 500+ controllers for managing them. Most of those controllers were copy/pasted code with minor changes in the WHERE clause of a SQL query.
Gretchen's company recently got purchased by Initech. Specifically, they were bought for their dev team, of all things. They had a few software products that were high performers, and Initech wanted that secret sauce. They bought the company, and then split the dev team up and migrated the developers to new products.
That actually worked out okay for Gretchen, most of the time. For a few projects, the dev team was given some requirements and a free hand to figure out how to deliver them. They were free to reuse code that existed or rewrite entirely, based on their own judgement. They were free to pick the tools they wanted to use, and the results worked out well.
Today's anonymous submitter works in finance. I'll let them start the introduction:
This is a legacy application that has been running for nearly a decade in production so one could say that it's been thoroughly tested by daily production use and nothing needs changing
Lillith was integrating some new tools into an existing Ruby on Rails API. The existing API allowed you to send a dry_run flag along with the request, so that you could have the service calculate its changes without applying them.
The problem was, the new tool Lillith was integrating could send, in the body of the request, {"dry_run": false}, but the service would see it as true. Consistently.
This week we have got a couple of Mathanon's. Maybe they're the same person, maybe they're not, there's really no way to know!
Frist anon has a "Numeric fun fact" for us: "Got a form sent from work to express interest in some event. They actually enforced the validation that the answer must be a number, so I submitted "42"." Bravo.
Today's anonymous submitter has spent a long time toiling through many, many tickets. Their effort has been an attempt to "save" their employer from the disaster left behind by by a highly-paid consultant. As one does, our submitter started with the highest priority tickets with the highest severity. Eventually, they whittled down that list, and had some bandwidth to start looking at the pieces of the code which clearly weren't exploding right now (because there were no tickets), but were likely to explode at some point in the future (creating a storm of tickets).
Scanning through the JavaScript, our submitter found a sort function. That was automatically concerning- why was that particular wheel being reinvented?
There's a language out there called "Progress Advanced Business Language" (or "Open Edge Advanced Business Language"). Just hearing that string of words in a sequence tells you you're in for it. It's a verbose, "English-like" programming language. But we're not here to pick on the language.
A long time ago, Mirjam had the "pleasure" of working in a Progress ABL environment. At some point, one of the developers had needed to find a date six months prior to the current date. It didn't need to be accurate, and thus said developer littered the code with comments reminding everyone that it didn't need to be that accurate. They arguably spent more time defending the choice to be inaccurate than it would have taken to write code that would have been accurate.
If you want to connect to another system, you need to supply credentials. That's a pretty obvious requirement. We can set aside the whole technical challenge of managing those credentials and the security problems various techniques create, and just focus in on: you must supply some credentials to authenticate.
Lisa has inherited a method which connects to another system. It, correctly, will complain if you don't supply parameters for credentials. It will, incorrectly, mislead you about their requirement:
Daniel recently started a new job. His first task was to fetch some data from the database and render it to the user. Easy enough, and there were already wrapper functions around the database to make it easy. He called execute_read, passed it a query, and checked the results.
There were no results. But the query definitely should have returned results. What was going on?
This week, friend Adam R. sent in an entry and included with it a link to a short-form YouTube video. Presumably this was a mistake, because I watched that video and the next one and the next one and the next one and after two hours I still haven't got this column ready. I won't share the video link with you. You're welcome.
What Adam really wanted to say was: "The USPS offers a sincerely service called Informed Delivery that, every morning, emails you scans of the exterior of your postal mail that you're expected to receive that day, which is a genuinely useful service (#not-sponsored). In today's digest, however, the subject line had an extra None thrown in there. Some Python script gone wrong that wasn't tested before production, perhaps?" We get lots of NaN, null, and undefined submissions, but None are actually rare.
A horse can only be so tenderized, but as well established at this point: I don't like Hungarian Notation. Richard G sends us an example of yet more of it, being misused, as well as some bad date handling. That's basically two of the easiest things to complain about, so let's take a look!
May 26DateTime sCDate2 = Convert.ToDateTime(Hdn_SelectedDate.Value);
Double dStart2 = double.Parse(Hdn_SelectedShifts.Value.Split('@')[0]); // Gets something like "10.5" for 10:30
// More code ...
DateTime lSelectedStartAdd = DateTime.Parse(sCDate2.ToShortDateString() + " " + DateTime.FromOADate((dStart2) / 24).ToShortTimeString());
Stella (previously) sends us a much elided snippet. The original code is several thousand lines contained in a single try block. But the WTF is pretty clear without seeing all of that:
try:
# the whole business logic without any exception handling
except:
print("Fudge")
We should always be wary of "(.+)-driven development". Things like test-driven development, or domain-driven development are fine, but they're also frequently approached from a perspective of dogma, which creates its own terrible outcomes.
But let's talk about domain-driven development. Without getting too bogged down into the details of the approach, the idea is pretty straightforward: describe you domain model without reference to any lower-level concerns, so you can effectively write your domain logic in an abstract language tuned to your specific needs. In other words, it's just a pretty good practice. DDD offers tools and techniques for doing it, and as stated, can be adopted as a point of dogma instead of technique.
Today's anonymous submitter sends us a React view that presents some admin options. Of course, it should only show us those admin options if the user is authorized to do that. So let's see how they implemented it:
{(isAdmin || canSeeResults) && (
<div>
<p>Admin Actions</p>
{(isAdmin || canSeeResults) && (
<div>
<button> Show Results </button>
</div>
)}
</div>
)}
"Scammer offers to buy Google" is certainly a new twist on a very old New York con. Jan B. explains "Scammers have found a new way to steal money, scrap LinkedIn profiles and then send out emails with fake offers to buy people's companies. I'm guessing suddenly they need some fees paid just before the deal is finalised. However, they may need to improve their filtering before sending out their scams, I don't even own Google!" I'm putting together a group of people to buy it, do you want to get in the deal? I'll just need you to transfer two million to this SWIFT account...
If there's one thing that seems to be a constant source of issues, it's people constructing SQL queries through string concatenation. Even if you're using parameters in the query, I'm opposed to handling raw SQL as strings in my programs. My solution is always "use a builder"- an API that constructs a syntax tree that it can then render to SQL as needed. (Yes, a builder, not an ORM, that's a whole other discussion, I'm not dogmatically anti-ORM, but it's a leaky abstraction at best.)
Many languages have such a thing, Java included. Lukasz's team was using Java, and they had a rule: "don't do SQL strings, use a builder". Unfortunately for Lukasz's team, their guideline didn't specify what kind of builder.
Frank suspected something odd when he spotted a use of React's useMemo function in some JavaScript code. Now, there's nothing wrong with using that method, in and of itself. It watches some variables and recalculates a callback if they change for any reason. It's a great tool for when you want to avoid recalculating expensive things over and over again.
But in this case, the calculation in question was isAuthorized, which wasn't an expensive calculation; it was just checking if certain values are set. The code looked like this:
Volodya sends us some bad date handling code in PHP. Which, I know, you're just reaching for the close tab and yawning when you hear that. You've seen it before. But bear with me, this one still has some fun bits to it.
$monthes = array(
1 => 'Января', 2 => 'Февраля', 3 => 'Марта', 4 => 'Апреля',
5 => 'Мая', 6 => 'Июня', 7 => 'Июля', 8 => 'Августа',
9 => 'Сентября', 10 => 'Октября', 11 => 'Ноября', 12 => 'Декабря'
);
The real WTF is that our long-time friend and submitter Argle failed to dissuade all three of his sons from pursuing IT careers of their own:
Back circa 2012, my three sons all got jobs at a company that had a brilliant web project. So brilliant that it had the support of a Disney VP, the mayor of the city, and other VIPs. At one point, my sons asked to borrow money to invest in the project. They are good boys (one is now a senior developer with Proctor & Gamble), so I backed them.