• (cs)

    Do the organizers plan on buying Bad Idea Offsets to negate the WTF of using "lines of code" as their metric?

  • kitikat (unregistered)

    And what 'bout perl one-liners? They would be less affected by such 'offsets' ;)

  • (cs)

    I'm not sure the planet has enough currency to afford the amount we need.

    Also do these come in the form of bats? I would like a Bad Code Offset bat please so I can beat the crap out of people I see writing retarded code.

  • Cynical Sam (unregistered)

    My sarcasm meter is pegged with this one... even though it could be implemented semi-seriously. The outright cynicism about our world that this displays nearly makes my head spin.

  • Just Another Unskilled Perl Hacker (unregistered) in reply to kitikat
    kitikat:
    And what 'bout perl one-liners? They would be less affected by such 'offsets' ;)
    True dat. Some of the Perl software I've hacked together would be completely debugged with 3 or 4 offset certificates. The coverage density would be amazing. A one-SLOC offset would paper over half-a-dozen bugs, easy.

    Now if I could find a way to make the users believe it...

    "No, no, the script is perfect. See? All of these pieces of paper say so!"

  • (cs)

    Great idea - how do I become a reseller?

  • Shredder (unregistered)

    Now TRWTF is TDWTF.

  • farcedude (unregistered)

    From the website: Q: Where does my money go?

    A: The proceeds from the sale of Bad Code Offsets are donated to various worthy Open Source initiatives that are carrying the fight against bad code on a daily basis. These organizations include:

    * jQuery
* PostgreSQL
* The Apache Software Foundation

    Makes the idea a little more palatable.

  • vtcodger (unregistered)

    Do those of us with a lot of bad code get offsets for it grandfathered in? Can we opt to keep the bad code and sell the offsets to Microsoft or give them to open source and take a charitable deduction on our taxes?

  • (cs)

    The naysayers will mock this wonderful initiative, but i have one word to describe it (and then some more) brillant!

    May it be as successful as Al-gore's plan! Hell, May it even be actually successful! Seriously, I'd even give you some money if i had a PayPal account (and money to waste).

  • Bob (unregistered)

    Awesome satire of the 'AGW' religious morons and their retarded cult.

  • SR (unregistered)

    A great idea! Ultimate Christmas present (especially if your office runs a secret Santa scheme).

    To all you whiners: get a sense of humour.

  • sir_flexalot (unregistered)

    If you have extra money and you're making coding mistakes that you need to offset, donate that money back to your boss becuase you're being overpaid.

  • SR (unregistered)

    A great idea! This year's ultimate Christmas present - especially if your office runs a secret Santa scheme.

    To all you whiners: get a sense of humour.

  • HurrDurr (unregistered)

    Wow, lots of people who are both humorless and too stupid to see this is a fun way to drive donations to open source projects. Now imagine these people in charge of your scrum team, your office, your government, your life. WTF, indeed.

  • HurrDurr (unregistered)

    BTW, bought a tenner.

  • !? (unregistered) in reply to Rootbeer

    That's great. Now I just need to remove all new lines from my code.

  • Bob (unregistered)

    Wait....WTF?....I thought this was just a good joke. You're not really selling these, are you? More importantly, there really aren't people dumb enough to think they would be accomplishing anything substantive by purchasing them, are there?

    Oh Lord....run for the hills

  • !? (unregistered) in reply to Rootbeer
    Rootbeer:
    Do the organizers plan on buying Bad Idea Offsets to negate the WTF of using "lines of code" as their metric?
    Should we use foots, meter or FILE_NOT_FOUND?
  • !? (unregistered) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    Wait....WTF?....I thought this was just a good joke. You're not really selling these, are you? More importantly, there really aren't people dumb enough to think they would be accomplishing anything substantive by purchasing them, are there?

    Oh Lord....run for the hills

    farcedude:
    From the website: Q: Where does my money go?

    A: The proceeds from the sale of Bad Code Offsets are donated to various worthy Open Source initiatives that are carrying the fight against bad code on a daily basis. These organizations include:

    * jQuery
* PostgreSQL
* The Apache Software Foundation

    Makes the idea a little more palatable.

  • Robb (unregistered)

    The entire Daily WTF entry is TRWTF.

    I tip my hat!

  • Nick (unregistered)

    I'm a social scientist by trade, and a programmer by accident.

    I'm going to need more of these things than I can afford. Can we set up a donation scheme for half-assed coders like me?

  • anon (unregistered)

    Here's a similar idea - http://cheatneutral.com/ - the offsetting part probably won't be relevant for most who read this site but maybe becoming a project would be.

  • My Name? (unregistered)

    There is a lot missing:

    ... desktops, servers and mainframes at school, at work and at home.

    It must be:

    ... iphones, laptops, desktops, servers and mainframes at school, at work, at home, at transportation and at toilet.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    Awesome satire of the 'AGW' religious morons and their retarded cult.

    you do realize that the political message is "cap/trade won't help stop global warming", not "global warming doesn't exist", right?

  • unwesen (unregistered)

    ... the ability to dedicate/gift these certificates, so you can buy & frame them for your coworkers.

  • Schnapple (unregistered) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    Awesome satire of the 'AGW' religious morons and their retarded cult.

    No, it's a play on the carbon neutrality thing wherein you purchase credits to offset your carbon usage. So for example companies which pollute a lot will buy credit - the money then goes to companies who will try to offset it, like planting trees and such. A smaller scale version is available for SUV owners who want good karma.

    All it really is, as has been pointed out, is a cute way to encourage people to contribute to open source projects.

  • dan (unregistered)

    Not a moment too soon! If these had been available previously, NASA could have bought a few of these to prevent those fatal accidents!

  • (cs)

    Just in the middle of working on new features to a class, which is in such a state that I was going through the mental process of 'Can I justify the refactoring time or shall I just shovel the new code in somewhere it does least harm' **. So instead I have a great solution - I can just buy some BCOs. But now my dilemma. It's a 2000 line class (should be logically split into 4 classes) but does that count as 'one poorly designed class', 'one large code file' or 'one small module', i.e. am I in for $25, $500 or $1250?

    ** Who am I kidding of course that's purely a mental exercise - management would never go for refactoring: "How does that make us money?"

  • Swa (unregistered)

    Problem with charities in general is that the organization itself usually takes more than 50% of the revenue and spends that on itself rather than the projects it is supposed to aid. This is true for nearly all charities.

    I find this a funny idea and not totally useless, but I fear that the supported projects will never see nearly as much money as this "Alliance" is receiving.

    PS: 6 tries to get this posted? good job!

  • HurrDurr (unregistered)

    You know you're not that bright, right?

  • pete (unregistered)

    I fear it may be too late for the world. The effects of bad code are already globally visible and radical thinking may be needed.

    Political argument within the Alliance for Code Excellence about the best course of action results in very little progress towards cleaner safer code.

    Government and corporate subsidy of bad code is still greater than that of subsidy for new code which in the long run may be cheaper.

    With the developing world now also needing to writing code our efforts to combat this may be futile.

    The effects are likely to become worse in the coming century hindering the global economy.

  • Anonymously Yours (unregistered)

    If this wasn't an Open Source fund raiser, I'd suggest further parodying carbon credits by saying these pay 3 cent/line coders in Eastern Europe and India to stay home and not work.

  • William Furr (unregistered)

    Wow, Alex, you really opened up a can of worms with your commenters. Tying in the idea of carbon offsets, AGW, and more loaded down your laudable donation drive and amusing idea with a ton of political baggage.

    +1 to what HurrDurr said in 290961: http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Introducing-Bad-Code-Offsets.aspx#290961

  • Calculator Ftvb from Futuramerlin.com (unregistered)

    Cool way to donate to FLOSS. One suggestion though — email the certificates, so as not to be taking money from the donations for shipping.

  • Romeo (unregistered)

    "Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance." — Eduardo Galeano

  • Samuel A. Falvo II (unregistered)

    What the fsck? No, really, WTF?

    The last time I checked, "Nettlesome bugs and poorly written code" have never prevented an engineer from reaching his full potential, for these are the result of an engineer who has already reached his limited potential to begin with. The whole idea of "code offsets" just smacks of dumb-ass profiteerism to me.

    Instead, what's needed is a profit sharing system mediated by an independent and disinterested third party -- something of a slight tweak on fairsoftware.net concept. For a project P, contributors to P are assigned a number of shares, such that as revenue accrues from sales or services related to the product, that revenue gets distributed to all parties according to their shares, after expenses of course. Each bug filed against P which goes unaddressed for a negotiated period of time, however, constitutes an expense to be determined in cooperation with the disinterested third party, thus reifying the concept of "technical debt" into something which can be accounted for on the books.

    In this case, you have economic incentives for bug-free code, to offer excellent customer service, and to keep shipping product. No stupid offsets are necessary.

  • SR (unregistered) in reply to Samuel A. Falvo II
    Samuel A. Falvo II:
    What the fsck? No, really, WTF?

    The last time I checked, "Nettlesome bugs and poorly written code" have never prevented an engineer from reaching his full potential, for these are the result of an engineer who has already reached his limited potential to begin with. The whole idea of "code offsets" just smacks of dumb-ass profiteerism to me.

    Instead, what's needed is a profit sharing system mediated by an independent and disinterested third party -- something of a slight tweak on fairsoftware.net concept. For a project P, contributors to P are assigned a number of shares, such that as revenue accrues from sales or services related to the product, that revenue gets distributed to all parties according to their shares, after expenses of course. Each bug filed against P which goes unaddressed for a negotiated period of time, however, constitutes an expense to be determined in cooperation with the disinterested third party, thus reifying the concept of "technical debt" into something which can be accounted for on the books.

    In this case, you have economic incentives for bug-free code, to offer excellent customer service, and to keep shipping product. No stupid offsets are necessary.

    Alex should've added one of these for you: [image]

    OK there's a serious side but even just skimming the comments above would have sved you making a tit of yourself.

  • Anon-E-Moose (unregistered)

    Sweet, I knew writing all of my code in the form of an IOCCC submission would pay off someday. Now I can buy my three and gift two to a friend and be covered!

  • (cs)

    Huh... You guys behind this project are making it seem that the programmers doing JQuery and Apache are paid per lines of code written.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    I will not be requiring any of these.

  • Carl (unregistered) in reply to Calculator Ftvb from Futuramerlin.com
    Calculator Ftvb from Futuramerlin.com:
    Cool way to donate to FLOSS. One suggestion though — email the certificates, so as not to be taking money from the donations for shipping.
    No, no, you can't use email for something this important!

    Instead, email a password that can be used to log in and download your certs. Or a shagnasty URL that links to a password reset page that links to a download page...

  • Fred (unregistered)

    You're going to need bigger bills for outfits like Microsoft and Adobe. Price maybe one trillion dollars each. Help shave down the "bailout" debt!

    If Sony tries to buy from you, though, you'll need to let them know that deliberately installing a rootkit when someone plays a LEGITIMATELY PURCHASED CD is not just "a few bad lines of code". They'll need to be looking into the "save the world Hara-kiri kit".

  • (cs)

    So how many vouchers are the writers of the forum software buying?

  • (cs)

    I think somebody should start up a joint Bad Grammar Offsets Web site (though I'm not sure who would get the funding...[1]). I've already found two grammar mistakes on the Bad Code Offset Web site! And I find them in almost every article here on TDWTF.

    Alex, I think what you need is an army of volunteer grammar "Nazis" to proof read written works before publishing them. :P It's one thing when it's a silly mistake that is easily ignorable, but sometimes I don't even know what you were trying to say and have to skip that part (not in this particular article, but a few articles ago, IIRC). :P

    I think the Bad Code Offsets is a GREAT idea though. Props to whomever is responsible for it. You have my full support!

    (I'm not an English major so I definitely make grammar mistakes too, but some mistakes are just blatantly invalid...)

    [1] Perhaps the funding could go towards an open source English language validator. :P Something programmer friendly with a command-line interface and semi-cryptic output that we can understand. :D

  • JG (unregistered) in reply to Samuel A. Falvo II
    Samuel A. Falvo II:
    What the fsck? No, really, WTF?

    The last time I checked, "Nettlesome bugs and poorly written code" have never prevented an engineer from reaching his full potential, for these are the result of an engineer who has already reached his limited potential to begin with. The whole idea of "code offsets" just smacks of dumb-ass profiteerism to me.

    Instead, what's needed is a profit sharing system mediated by an independent and disinterested third party -- something of a slight tweak on fairsoftware.net concept. For a project P, contributors to P are assigned a number of shares, such that as revenue accrues from sales or services related to the product, that revenue gets distributed to all parties according to their shares, after expenses of course. Each bug filed against P which goes unaddressed for a negotiated period of time, however, constitutes an expense to be determined in cooperation with the disinterested third party, thus reifying the concept of "technical debt" into something which can be accounted for on the books.

    In this case, you have economic incentives for bug-free code, to offer excellent customer service, and to keep shipping product. No stupid offsets are necessary.

    Are you seriously this dumb? Or just trying real hard.

  • (cs)

    50¢/SLOC actually seems kind of steep if you ask me... :-/ It might generate more money if more people could afford to atone. 10000 contributors at 0.5¢/SLOC is worth the same as 100 contributors at 50¢/SLOC. If you can imagine yourself having written 5-10K bad SLOCs then you can see how $25-50 is much more affordable than $2500-5000. I'm much more likely to part with the $25-50 and much more likely to be turned off by $2500-5000.

    /2¢
  • aaaaaargh (unregistered) in reply to xtremezone
    xtremezone:
    50¢/SLOC actually seems kind of steep if you ask me... :-/ It might generate more money if more people could afford to atone. 10000 contributors at 0.5¢/SLOC is worth the same as 100 contributors at 50¢/SLOC. If you can imagine yourself having written 5-10K bad SLOCs then you can see how $25-50 is much more affordable than $2500-5000. I'm much more likely to part with the $25-50 and much more likely to be turned off by $2500-5000. 
    /2¢

    Apparently TDWTF readers are without humor. D'oh

  • J (unregistered)

    Wow. Surely the only "creditable" projects aren't the ones listed, right? How can I earn credits from my well-written code (code-sequestration?) to be able to trade for one of them thar certificates?

  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to Rootbeer
    Rootbeer:
    Do the organizers plan on buying Bad Idea Offsets to negate the WTF of using "lines of code" as their metric?

    Sounds like an idea for the next programmer's corner - how many WTFs can you fit in a one liner?

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