The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2013-08-16 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
We need more car analogies

The problem with car analogies is that eventually they run into a limitation which is typified by cars.

CAPTCHA: haero -- the new flying rabbit.

Nagesh · 2013-08-16 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
JimmyCrackedCorn:
Of course the bigger WTF is having a large important application written in Perl. Really. Wow.

+1

Having just inherited a large Perl app that I'm maintaining for free, I fully support this comment.

be happy that it is not in visual basic 6.0

chubertdev · 2013-08-16 Reply Admin

I'd rather have VB6 than anything like Perl or Java.

2013-08-16 Reply Admin

Looks like you got some CodeSOD in your Feature Article, there.

2013-08-16 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
We need more car analogies

A car is like a computer. When you depend on it to run, it crashes.

2013-08-17 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
Perl is the same thing: It works sure, but there are MUCH better alternatives now so there's no real reason to stick with Perl, as it's harder to find a Perl developer than say a PHP or even a Python developer. The big Perl app might work, but it would probably be BETTER if it was good PHP or Python or even Java.

Okay. Name me one thing that's better in Python (indentation doesn't count) or PHP, just one thing that makes Perl worse.

Perl as a language is very efficient in separating the wheat from the chaff. It looks like your preconceptions have been made by evaluating code written by the chaff.

Coyne · 2013-08-18 Reply Admin

He totally should have used Fibonacci lengths:

 $blank1  = " ";
 $blank2  = $blank1 . $blank1;
 $blank3  = $blank1 . $blank2;
 $blank5  = $blank2 . $blank3;
 $blank8  = $blank3 . $blank5;
 $blank13 = $blank5 . $blank8;
 $blank21 = $blank8 . $blank13;
 $blank34 = $blank13 . $blank21;
 $blank55 = $blank21 . $blank34;

That would have been so much more impressive a display of knowledge! Not to mention more extensible!

2013-08-18 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
Perl. I think that says it all.

Yes. You are so right. Because writing it in Python would have made it sooo much better:

blank1 = " "
blank2 = "  "
...etc.

Wow. What a difference!

2013-08-18 Reply Admin

Herr Otto Flick:
nimis:
JimmyCrackedCorn:
Of course the bigger WTF is having a large important application written in Perl. Really. Wow.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Perl, and you are a disgusting ignorant bigot.

There is so much wrong with Perl that I keep a wiki page at $JOB with all the stupid shit that people get wrong when they come to play in Perl-land for a couple of hours.

Big deal. People who don't know x will get it wrong..for any value of x. So what you're saying is that you keep your own personal DailyWTF for $JOB, and you're blaming it on Perl?

2013-08-18 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
I'd rather have VB6 than anything like Perl or Java.

Trade'ya.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

JimmyCrackedCorn:
I would agree that Perl can be very handy. I have developed on and off in Perl for 15 years. I have also seen some of the worst kind of code written in it, too. It always comes down to the skill of the developer. Scripted languages tend to give the novice a false sense of security...right up to the point where they wake up to the realization that their large scale complex and important application is unmanageable.

Much like your redundant usage of "also" and "too", the term "scripted languages" doesn't convey any meaningful information. I'd expect someone bragging about fifteen years of programming experience to have identified that long ago.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
The big Perl app might work, but it would probably be BETTER if it was good PHP or Python or even Java.

"good PHP"? PFFFTAHAHAHAHA! PHP is defined by it's reference implementation, which is written in C. C has implementation-defined and undefined aspects, which the PHP reference implementation uses. PHP defined through translation using an Intel compiler on an x86/64 architecture may be very different to PHP defined through translation using a gcc compiler on an ARM architecture. Depending upon how you look at it, there are either a large number of "PHP languages" due to subtle differences in compilers and/or architectures, or the "PHP language" is vague, unportable or buggy.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Bananafish:
So true, faoileag. A 25-line Perl script takes 38 hours to process 2,000,000 tiny little files. The same job can be done in 37 hours with a 69 line Java program, 28 hours with a 45 line Awk script, or 11 hours with a 700 line COBOL program.

faoileag was clearly talking lines of code being a poor measurement of expressiveness, not optimisation. If you were to run the same Java program on a VM from fifteen years ago, it's probably take about a week. Does it make sense to attribute speed to language? Not really, no.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Stop confusing implementation and specification...

Nagesh · 2013-08-19 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
I'd rather have VB6 than anything like Perl or Java.

You're just pulling my leg now. No one in correct frame of mind would select VB6 over Java. What chemical imbalance is your mind going through? drink some coffee. that is knowing to correct most imbalances.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Grown up:
Sorry, some of us graduated from kindergarten years ago.
Seriously, the FRIST meme was hackneyed on day one.

Captcha: wisi :adj: "Smartah"

I'm wisi than you.

Completely disagree. FRIST!'s the only meme that still makes me laugh. Reminds me of a dog I used to have. Wagged his tail so hard he fell over whenever someone he hadn't seen for a while came through the door.

Also, your on the internet, old man, so watch you're grammer! Comparators like smartah and wisi should always take "then" not "than" as there preposition, especially in comments that comment on memes.

(Oh the glare, the glare, my eyes, the glare, it hurts!)

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

SomeGuy:
ObiWayneKenobi:
Perl. I think that says it all.

Yes. You are so right. Because writing it in Python would have made it sooo much better:
blank1 = " "
blank2 = "  "
...etc.
Wow. What a difference!

Dude, you have no idea. What makes Python awesome is that it gives you a way to deal with new lines!

linebreak1 = """ """

linebreak2 = """

"""

...

Try doing that in perl.

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Bananafish:
A well designed and structured COBOL program was lightning fast in this case.

You weren't tempted to cobble one together then?

Severity One · 2013-08-21 Reply Admin

faoileag:
Apart from the fact that the developer doesn't seem to be familiar with the wonderful regex capabilities of perl that make string literals consisting of blanks completely unnecessary, [...]

The repetition operator (x), which you don't seem to be familiar with, makes regular expressions in this particular care completely unnecessary.

if( $string eq ( ' ' x 11 ) )
{
    # ...
}

2013-08-22 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
Perl is the same thing: It works sure, but there are MUCH better alternatives now so there's no real reason to stick with Perl, as it's harder to find a Perl developer than say a PHP or even a Python developer. The big Perl app might work, but it would probably be BETTER if it was good PHP or Python or even Java.

Good PHP? Good PHP!? ... BURN THE HERETIC!!

2013-08-24 Reply Admin

@Bananafish @CharlesF

Props for making COBOL work to do your bioinformatics scan (presumably chunking up groups of codons in DNA/RNA/Protein???)

As to the assumption that "Java can do anything, better". No, it can't, not always. COBOL has a thing called "redefine" that lets record definitions overlay each other. Of course, as somebody pointed out, you can also do this in C with a union. I'll add in Pascal, with a variant record, for completeness. (I'm sure there are other Algol derived languages that do this as well, but I know Pascal & C)

Since there are a small number of symbols, we just need what are essentially byte arrays (rather than unicode), and a way to re-anchor the start of the current region quickly. Using the alternate record interpretation allows a quick jump ahead to the next "check point" within the array. Perhaps pointers in C or Pascal would have been better at doing this, but the guy made something work, quickly on large data sets.

(large data sets are something Java sucks at, though it's good at haphazardly concatenating together result sets from a database, which did the heavy lifting, into a markup template)

Maybe you could use a byte array in Java, and an index value to skip around in it, but I suspect it would still be substantially slower than the old-school manual memory management languages. It would likely be faster than reading data as String in java and doing substring calls on it, but still a fair amount slower than the "archaic" languages some of us learned once upon a time.

Signed, Roboprog, a Pascal, er XBase, er C, er Perl, er Java, (and whole bunch of other crap) programmer

2013-08-28 Reply Admin

Mike:
Heh - Perl would be an improvement to ours. Critical app, written entirely in BASH script. Over 300 lines and takes around 4 hrs to run every day.

Bash is great, and 300 lines is not that long. I'm at a fortune 500. We probably have over a thousand bash scripts for batch processing, many of which are several thousand lines of code. That's my favorite part of our code base :)

2013-09-18 Reply Admin

SomeGuy:
Herr Otto Flick:
nimis:
JimmyCrackedCorn:
Of course the bigger WTF is having a large important application written in Perl. Really. Wow.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Perl, and you are a disgusting ignorant bigot.

There is so much wrong with Perl that I keep a wiki page at $JOB with all the stupid shit that people get wrong when they come to play in Perl-land for a couple of hours.

Big deal. People who don't know x will get it wrong..for any value of x. So what you're saying is that you keep your own personal DailyWTF for $JOB, and you're blaming it on Perl?

Well I don't have to keep one for C++, C or Python…

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