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Admin
This comment used to be worse.
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Better >= Less Bad
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Now I want to see how they did that in excel, but i wonder if the interblog would explode in a fury of Spreadsheet Cells...
http://pugsoft.info
Captcha: Sino | Hrm.. is that like BINGO?
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"colleauge"? For the love of god, is it that hard to run a spell-check pass on these things before posting them?
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Cue the Four Yorkshire Men in 5....4....3...
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VB6 and Regular Expressions?! VB6 is obviously a WTF on its own (and I think most of us knew that it could gobble up massive amounts of memory) but why in the holy hell would you do a ton of RegEx through VB at all? It's crap like that that Perl was made for.
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2... 1...
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
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You were lucky....
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When do people learn that some things can be expressed in regexes, but are better handled in a different way? Like, using parser generators (yes I know, steep learning curve), or an existing library to search through HTML?
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.
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It used to be worse...
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It used to be worse.
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And now we see the root cause of all this madness.
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If regular expressions are never the solution to your problems, you do not have very interesting problems.
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In a completely unrelated WTF: I had to get up at 4:30 tonight because my mother-in-law had to catch a plane at 7 AM. (WTF # 1)
Next thing, I had to call here a Taxi (WTF #2)
But unfortunately I seemed to have mistyped the number and thus rang somebody out of bed (WTF #3, or #1 from his perspective)
Now I wonder what is worse: being so tired that you are not able to dial a simple telephone number, or having a phone number which is similar to a taxi centre?
Just asking ;-)
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Ok, now I gotta know. We need details of the CEO's Excel implementation!
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On the other hand, you never knows when you might need them :-)
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And here you go! http://www.phespirit.info/montypython/four_yorkshiremen.htm
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this is my everyday life. I work on an ancient asp application that has been through 3 different developers and one hobbyist, with no one whose sole job was the app, well skip forward several years and that's my job now. Now when new content needs to be added i don't have to update the 12 or so static lists of product ids,skus, switch cases, or update the giant text file that lists what should be available, hell i don't even have to update it, the production manager can do it.
yeah writing yourself out of a job
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No. It's a rhetorical question. Answering it would be a WTF.
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I suspect that this effect accounts for a lot of WTF posts. You know the ones, where the protagonist inherits code from some prior "great programmer" only to discover that it's crap? I'll bet that in a non-trivial number of those cases the prior programmer could explain that "It used to be worse."
Actually, "it used to be worse" is a pretty good description of how a lot of systems evolve. Maybe the CEO, an idea guy, figured out a way to make money by solving a certain problem. He used the idea-guy Swiss army knife, a spreadsheet. This worked until his business grew too large for he and his assistants to maintain all the spreadsheets, but they were smart enough to hire a programmer to automate pieces of it. He used a methodology that was easy to launch but, like the spreadsheet solution, it wouldn't scale well as the business got larger. So another programmer was brought in to upgrade it... Repeat as needed.
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Back in college, my dorm # was similar to public safety. I remember once being woken up from one of the rare occasions I got to sleep to: Her: "There's a guy here in the computer lab and he won't leave and I need to close." Me: "And what the hell do you want me to do about it?" click
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How very public spirited of you. Has she recovered from being attacked yet?
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Yeah. My mother in law was a barge...
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It used to be worse It used to be worse I debugged around And finally found The source of my curse That damned XML Was giving me hell Name conventions were sad Redundancy bad It used to be worse
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For the Blue ! we need a couple more verses please Code Dependent.
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Yeah, I've been there. I once worked for a company where their flagship product started out as the owner's son's high school comp sci final project. They were still using Delphi to build it, and needless to say it was a piece of crap that didn't work correctly, was hard to maintain and impossible to update. And of course, they had no idea how to write software properly. Shortest job I ever had. It was so retarded I started looking for a new job just a few months after being hired.
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I find it difficult to believe these people survive in the wild. After all, with the schemes some people come up with to solve technical problems you'd think eating involves a dump truck and a grocery-store visits involve a pack of Llamas led by Richard Simmons.
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Don't know about anyone else, but I want to see the Excel version.
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AT the time I didn't realize whom the call was for - was early in the semester and I hadn't noticed similarities in numbers yet. Also, try and think clearly when you get 10 hours of sleep a week and you've just been woken up suddenly.
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I can't let you do that, Dave.
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Overuse of regex, because you think it "looks cool" or for whatever reason you use it over something basic and simple, is all too common.
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You haven't had your kool-aid yet today, have you? .Net, VB, C#... languages of the fucking gods, man.
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No no! He could have posted 'first' using Excel - THAT would have been worse.
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Or, better, "Confusious says"
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No, Perl is not for regular expressions. WTF.
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This comment used to be first!
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Man: I was calling to check on the status of my car. My name's Mr. Smith. Brother: The black chevy sedan? Man: No the red ford pickup. Brother: Oh right. Well while our guys were in there, they found some problems with the engine and had to replace it. Man: What?! Brother: And while they were removing the engine, the transmission was damaged so that had to be replaced too. Man: You've got the be f'in jokin' me. I brought it in for an oil change!
Thankfully for us (mostly my parents) the guy never figured out where the phone number he dialed actually went to.
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FUD