• ray10k (unregistered)

    Still an adorable story.

  • (nodebb)

    The abracadabra string, it's mostly comedy and a little WTF. Cold Fusion, on the other hand...

  • TruePony (unregistered)

    This isn’t really that bad, is it? Some developer found a bug, didn’t have the time to fix it, and so they documented the bug and implemented a safe, obvious work around. Nevertheless, it’s still a “smell” that there’s some bigger problems under the surface.

  • Loren Pechtel (google) in reply to TruePony

    I don't think it's a matter of not having time, but not being the same developer. The UI guy discovered the back end barfed on a null string and thus provided a work-around. No WTF here.

  • Lorens (unregistered)

    But if someone sells an item with that name somewhere in the description, it automatically becomes the default item for the empty search. Profit!

  • Regurgitated rubbish (unregistered) in reply to Loren Pechtel

    the back end barfed on a null string

    Yeah but what if I was trying to buy a bunch of null strings? In purple? They're on sale y'know.

  • siciac (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    Cold Fusion was incredibly solid and reliable until they started to get enterprisey and added Java support.

  • bobcat (unregistered) in reply to TruePony

    Yeah, but not one they have the time (budget) to hunt down and fix. You know it's going to be one of THOSE bugs, it's thin dark tendrils wrapped around sixteen other functions, where removing or changing it will cause the whole thing to not only barf horribly, but insult the user's mother. Oh, and the code can't be touched because it was entered by the manager's 'genius' nephew... So, a patch job for an issue that shouldn't come up often, that should hold until something major breaks and/or an upgrade is made, and the real fix implemented.

  • Ashley Sheridan (unregistered) in reply to siciac

    Cold Fusion was awful! It actively encouraged you to mix business logic and presentation code, and even things like SQL was handled in an awful way. I can't think of a single thing that was good about it. Even Microsoft realised pretty early on that code "tags" that are just shoved into the HTML are awful, and they've been actively trying to do their best to pretend classic ASP (the closest thing I can think of to CF) was never a thing.

  • notroot (unregistered)

    Even the sound of it is something quite atrocious.

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