• Scourge of Programmers (unregistered) in reply to Scourge of programmers.
    Scourge of programmers.:
    Jimmy the Kid:
    doco

    Seriously, that's a word now?

    I am flattered to meet my namesake.

  • (cs) in reply to YellowOnline
    YellowOnline:
    "dÈmodÈ"? "démodé"!
    "Count de Money!"

    "De Monet." "De MoNET!"

  • Gumpy Gus (unregistered)

    I've seen similar goofy code, where the enterprise architect decreed that all parameters must be declared as void *. The big guy in Madrid probably thought that call by text string was the bees-knees, it worked just fine in his 5-line test program, therefore everybody should use it.

  • (cs)

    toString is démodé?

    Sorry, but I've just tostRing.

  • LarryLaffer (unregistered) in reply to Pawprint
    Pawprint:
    YellowOnline:
    "dÈmodÈ"? "démodé"!
    "Count de Money!"

    "De Monet." "De MoNET!"

    Don't get saucy with me Bernaise!

  • Darren (unregistered) in reply to anonymous

    I agree too with both comments.

  • Spencer (unregistered) in reply to Doodpants
    Doodpants:
    Scourge of programmers.:
    Jimmy the Kid:
    doco

    Seriously, that's a word now?

    Apparently you can abbreviate any noun by appending an "o" to the first syllable. "Computer" becomes "Compo". "Raspberries" becomes "Raspbo". "Antidisestablismentarianism" becomes "Anto". It works with anything!

    'straya (caaaarnt)!

    Shorten (usually by dropping the last syllable, or all except the first syllable) and append either o, zza, or y

    eg. Robert => Robbo, Gary => Gazza, cockroach => cocky Although, compo = compensation, usually work compensation (ie. work-related injury or overtime). Raspberries don't get shortened though, and Anto would be short for Anthony (if they don't go by Tony). "Antidisestablishmentarianism" is just "fuck off with ya long words ya poofter"

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    Having worked with foreign-language code-bases in the past, this is pretty standard. Since the keywords tend to remain in English, people will mix-and-match languages all the time.
    Did that too when I started programming, mixed German with English till I even confused myself. Now I'm only using English. On the other hand SAP made several billions by mixing German with English...
  • Cheong (unregistered) in reply to nimis
    nimis:
    Maybe he should have a look at the log file. Is might have become quite big after ten years. And appending stuff would then require an increasing amount of time.
    I don't know whether it the case in Java, but in .NET appending file (if it's really File.AppendText()), the data is written and the nodes on disk is updated. The data before that point is not loaded. There aren't much difference in appending 200kb of data to a blank file and 1TB sized file. (there could be time difference due to allocating new nodes, but the difference should be barely noticable)
  • Zainab58 (unregistered) in reply to Planar

    It's neither a typo nor a misspelling but an encoding problem, specifically Latin-1 (either ISO or Windows) being interpreted as Mac Roman. Our Hero should also expect to meet ñ rendered as Ò.

    In a non-English-speaking country, this kind of error can be lethal. But that's a whole other wtf.

    Captcha: "ingenium". Oh, don't be silly, it was nothing.

  • Herr Otto Flick (unregistered) in reply to slicer
    slicer:
    I worked for a rather large tax preparation firm and we had hired an offshore consulting firm to integrate financial advice into the tax experience. The consulting firm, as one might expect, handed us back something ridiculously slow. As it turns out, they wrote all their methods to take a single string parameter and return a single string parameter: XML. Each method unpacked incoming data from it and then packaged up return data.

    TRWTF is that you think that is bad.

  • Herr Otto Flick (unregistered) in reply to Spencer
    Spencer:
    'straya (caaaarnt)!

    Shorten (usually by dropping the last syllable, or all except the first syllable) and append either o, zza, or y

    eg. Robert => Robbo, Gary => Gazza, cockroach => cocky Although, compo = compensation, usually work compensation (ie. work-related injury or overtime). Raspberries don't get shortened though, and Anto would be short for Anthony (if they don't go by Tony). "Antidisestablishmentarianism" is just "fuck off with ya long words ya poofter"

    "Tony"? Bit long isn't it, we just use 'Tone', drop that long e - but keep the long o, otherwise its a measurement of weight.

  • AN AWESOME CODER (unregistered)

    What documentation could you imagine that would have made the solution he went with more obvious?

    And how many projects has any experienced person been a part of here where tracking down some dudes who wrote the software 10 years ago is faster than spending some time stepping trough the code?

    I know proper documentation is great, but is reading code a lost art?

    This article sucks.

  • qazwsx (unregistered) in reply to AN AWESOME CODER
    AN AWESOME CODER:
    This article sucks.

    That's a common pattern with the guy who wrote had written the article.

  • (cs) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    I believe the reflection stupidity part, but the whole "track-down-the-original-developers-in-Madrid" is pure story bloat!

    The original developers were idiots, period! Just scrap all the useless code, improve whatever you can and move on.

    If someone wrote something as stupid as this reflection scheme, would anyone reasonably believe that it would be any good getting in contact with the said person? Only two scenarios are possible if you ever get an answer: "Neat, huh?" (in this case, the guy is still as dumb as always) or "I'm really sorry, man! I was totally inexperienced, and thought it was a good idea..." (the guy learned his lession, but the code is crap because it is).

    When I joined my current company, my first assignment was on a team supporting a mission-critical application originally written by offshore contractors. They took this retarded reflection scheme to a new level and to this day still try to defend it.

    Part of this application is a .NET web service. The offshore devs thought reflection was the greatest thing ever, so they wrote 90% of this complex web service in a single class. They divided this class as a partial amongst 130+ individual source files.

    Rather than directly calling methods on this unholy monster, they have a single utility class that takes the name of a method as a string, plus a variable-length array (of type Object) to hold whatever parameters you'd care to pass. The utility class then reflects over the monster class and calls the appropriate method, blindly assuming the varargs will match the method signature. At last count there were 783 methods in the beast. Calling any of them requires a developer to know ahead of time the specific parameter type and order, so he can construct the varargs array appropriately.

    Offshore defends this monstrosity by claiming that a brand-new developer can come in and start bolting on functionality immediately without impacting any other part of the system.

  • bigbob (unregistered) in reply to Smitty
    Smitty:
    anonymous:
    I believe the reflection stupidity part, but the whole "track-down-the-original-developers-in-Madrid" is pure story bloat!

    The original developers were idiots, period! Just scrap all the useless code, improve whatever you can and move on.

    If someone wrote something as stupid as this reflection scheme, would anyone reasonably believe that it would be any good getting in contact with the said person? Only two scenarios are possible if you ever get an answer: "Neat, huh?" (in this case, the guy is still as dumb as always) or "I'm really sorry, man! I was totally inexperienced, and thought it was a good idea..." (the guy learned his lession, but the code is crap because it is).

    When I joined my current company, my first assignment was on a team supporting a mission-critical application originally written by offshore contractors. They took this retarded reflection scheme to a new level and to this day still try to defend it.

    Part of this application is a .NET web service. The offshore devs thought reflection was the greatest thing ever, so they wrote 90% of this complex web service in a single class. They divided this class as a partial amongst 130+ individual source files.

    Rather than directly calling methods on this unholy monster, they have a single utility class that takes the name of a method as a string, plus a variable-length array (of type Object) to hold whatever parameters you'd care to pass. The utility class then reflects over the monster class and calls the appropriate method, blindly assuming the varargs will match the method signature. At last count there were 783 methods in the beast. Calling any of them requires a developer to know ahead of time the specific parameter type and order, so he can construct the varargs array appropriately.

    Offshore defends this monstrosity by claiming that a brand-new developer can come in and start bolting on functionality immediately without impacting any other part of the system.

    Funcking hell mate, when I think I've heard of all the fucking stupidities that developers can inflict on the world, a new one comes around the corner. Respect / commiserations etc.

  • Scourge of Programmers (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Remy Porter:
    Having worked with foreign-language code-bases in the past, this is pretty standard. Since the keywords tend to remain in English, people will mix-and-match languages all the time.
    Did that too when I started programming, mixed German with English till I even confused myself. Now I'm only using English. On the other hand SAP made several billions by mixing German with English...

    Last time the world witnessed mixing German with English was the birth of Queen Victoria

  • (cs) in reply to Scourge of Programmers
    Scourge of Programmers:
    Anon:
    SAP made several billions by mixing German with English.
    Last time the world witnessed mixing German with English was the birth of Queen Victoria

    SAP gave birth to Queen Victoria?

  • Evan (unregistered) in reply to Cheong
    Cheong:
    I don't know whether it the case in Java, but in .NET appending file (if it's really File.AppendText()), the data is written and the nodes on disk is updated. The data before that point is not loaded. There aren't much difference in appending 200kb of data to a blank file and 1TB sized file. (there could be time difference due to allocating new nodes, but the difference should be barely noticable)
    Yeah. If your language/library takes longer to append to a larger file, said language/library is TRWTF. Disk appending isn't in-memory string appending where you can carelessly turn a linear-time algorithm into a quadratic one if you do dump things with appends.
  • Friedrice The Great (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    Doodpants:
    Scourge of programmers.:
    Jimmy the Kid:
    doco

    Seriously, that's a word now?

    Apparently you can abbreviate any noun by appending an "o" to the first syllable. "Computer" becomes "Compo". "Raspberries" becomes "Raspbo". "Antidisestablismentarianism" becomes "Anto". It works with anything!

    A recent fad in the UK was to create a nickname for someone by taking the first two (or three) letters of their first name and concatenate them with the first two (or three) letters of their last name.

    Hence you get such delights as:

    • SuBo (Susan Boyle)
    • BoJo (Boris Johnson)
    • SamCam (Samantha Cameron)

    Rumour has it that Pete Doherty was not a big fan of this craze.

    Used to work with someone whose login ID (produced by the company-standard rules) was suyoshit. Always liked that one.

  • (cs)

    Knew someone that ended up with "[email protected]" as his student email address because of how they were created.

  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    Knew someone that ended up with "[email protected]" as his student email address because of how they were created.

    Don't forget the notion of concatenating the conversational abbreviation of the first name with the first initial of the surname (popular in the early days of the internet when it was all such a novelty) that gave a colleague of mine the wonderful email address of "[email protected]".

  • slicer (unregistered) in reply to Herr Otto Flick

    Please kindly elucidate me as to why you consider having everything "stringly typed" (even better, XML typed) is good? I'm not talking a service layer that interchanges data with a totally different system here - this is one method calling another method within the same module.

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    chubertdev:
    Knew someone that ended up with "[email protected]" as his student email address because of how they were created.

    Don't forget the notion of concatenating the conversational abbreviation of the first name with the first initial of the surname (popular in the early days of the internet when it was all such a novelty) that gave a colleague of mine the wonderful email address of "[email protected]".

    That shouldn't be a problem. There are real people who really have that as their last name. If their last name is their userid for e-mail that shouldn't be a problem. More troublesome would be getting shouted at by co-workers all the time for failures that they weren't even involved in.

  • (cs)

    This category is called CodeSOD. The S stands for "snippet".

    The article is 727 words long.

    STOP THIS MADNESS!!

    "Code snippets" on this site used to look like this:

    Eric Casto came across some code written by a co-worker who really wanted to make sure his bases were covered ...

    if (connected || !connected) { //ED: Snip }

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    C) Fly to Madrid on the company's dime in a vain attempt to track down the original developers and have them explain it to you because apparently you are too fucking stupid to work it out yourself.

    Why would you fly from central Spain to Madrid. It's at worst 2 hours by car.

    Captcha: incassum. Just incassum you're interested.

  • sob'l (unregistered)

    Mixing English with Español/Français/Deutsch is bad? How about consonants of romanized 中文?

    Take "The Daily WTF" as an example. Google translate it to "每日跆拳道" (far from accurate btw). Romanize to "Měi rì táiquándào". Extract the consonants to form "mrtqd". Notice that Chinese has a very high proportion of homophones. Even the full romanization is hard to read without context. Any information is utterly destroyed by this "acronym".

    And to make it worse romanization is based on Mandarin, which evolved in northern China. My native tongue is Cantonese, a southern dialect. Their pronunciations are quite different, and there is quite often a switch in consonants.

    At least Mandarin is the official tongue so it was taught in school. I couldn't imagine if it is transliterated from another local dialect spoken in area thousands of kilometers away...

    Captcha: plaga, reverse engineering skill is needed to cleanse the plaga from inherited code base.

  • Essex Kitten (unregistered)

    My money is on Embarcadero. No reason. That's the name that popped in my head when you said "branches across Europe". I don't even know where these guys have branches, but I encountered one somewhere east once :D

  • group buy tools (unregistered)

    Hello – I must say, I’m impressed with your site. I had no trouble navigating through all the tabs and information was very easy to access. I found what I wanted in no time at all. Pretty awesome. Would appreciate it if you add forums or something, it would be a perfect way for your clients to interact. Great job group buy seo

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