The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2013-01-11 Reply Admin

savar:
Clever is a strong word. This is still very stupid code. (Hint: each field is hard coded, as is the constant 0.09.) But I agree its not exactly a WTF either. It's bad code that kinda works for what it was supposed to do.

I'm not sure an extra level of abstraction is going to improve things. At least here the wtf is contained

2013-01-14 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
gallier2:
Transforming 100*ct/9.0 to ct/0.09 should be obvious to anyone
Possibly obvious, but also wrong: 0.09 can't be exactly represented in IEEE floating-point, so you may get a fractionally different result. It happens to work for 9 items, but not in general e.g.
$ python -c 'import math; print math.ceil(57/0.57)'
101

That's because you're using IEEE math instead of ASCII math.

2013-01-17 Reply Admin

If this is supposed to get percentage complete, shouldn't it be 100 * ct/9, or 11.11 * ct?

2013-01-25 Reply Admin

In JS you could probably do:

elementslist = [ "nickname", "websiteUrl", "linkedin",  "locationString", "title", "bio", "imageUrl", "resume"]

..... if typeof( u[element] ) ....

2013-06-26 Reply Admin

I found the following WTFs:

"proFormComplete" means... "procent form complete"?
there's an anonymous function for no apparent reason*
"user" is a global variable instead of an argument
"user" has a getter method that returns... itself?
two variable definition lines in a row, both with "var"**
"0 +" does absolutely nothing that the next "+" wouldn't do
typeof is not a function; the parentheses do nothing
why the need to check the types... they might not be strings?
the only thing equal to "string" is "string"; exact comparison is unnecessary
string.length > 0 instead of string > "" (when we know it's a String)
"value && true" instead of "!!value" (or just "value", if it's Boolean)
variable that holds a stupid intermediate value**
no comments whatsoever

*it's not an event; the only other reason it would need to be done this way is if it's nested inside another function - in which case, that's another WTF. **this should be done when it helps improve readability; it doesn't, so why bother?

Dividing by 0.09 is not a WTF. Yes, you could multiply by 11.1 instead. No, it wouldn't make any substantial difference.

Without making it much less "clever", this is how the code should probably look:

function percentFormComplete(u) {
// Sums the number of values that aren't blank
// and returns an integer between 0 and 100
return Math.round(
(
(typeof u.nickname == "string" && u.nickname > "") +
(typeof u.websiteUrl == "string" && u.websiteUrl > "") +
(typeof u.linkedin == "string" && u.linkedin > "") +
(typeof u.locationString == "string" && u.locationString > "") +
(typeof u.title == "string" && u.title > "") +
(typeof u.bio == "string" && u.bio > "") +
(typeof u.imageUrl == "string" && u.imageUrl > "") +
(typeof u.resume == "string" && u.resume > "") +
!!u.employerSharing
) / 0.09);
}

Divide and Validate

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