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A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.
Carl was debugging a job management script. The first thing that caught his attention was that the script was called file.bat. They were running on Linux.
The second thing he noticed, was that the script was designed to manage up to 999 jobs, and needed to simply roll job count over once it exceeded 999- that is to say, job 1 comes after job 999.
We all know the perils of bad date handling, and Claus was handed an annoying down bug in some date handling.
The end users of Claus's application do a lot of work in January. It's the busiest time of the year for them. Late last year, one of the veteran users raised a warning: "Things stop working right in January, and it creates a lot of problems."
Today, Mike sends us a Java Representative Line that is, well, very representative. The line itself isn't inherently a WTF, but it points to WTFs behind it. It's an omen of WTFs, a harbinger.
Sep 25ArrayList[] data = new ArrayList[dataList.size()];