• Auto Frist (unregistered)

    Auto Frist in 3 days! Halllllellluiaaaaaaa!!!

  • dpm (unregistered)

    Probably, there's a table for additional fields to which Ronnie could add a column in order to mark the field mandatory or optional.

    HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

    Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder. BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

    "Probably, there's hardcoded JavaScript copypasted unto infinity, each time slightly different for the particular field." There, fixed that for you.

  • Prime Mover (unregistered)

    TL;DR:

    OP made a change.

    Through lack of ability, OP couldn't get it to work.

    Through lack of the appropriate personal qualities, OP could not get anyone on her team to help.

    OP gave up.

    TRWTF: The amendment was obviously not really wanted very much in the first place, or someone would have asked questions about it and assigned some competent effort to it.

    Nothing to see here; move along now.

  • WTFGuy (unregistered)

    It sounds like this is working out well, although as is usual here at WTF, for all the wrong reasons.

    1. Whoever requested the feature has demonstrated by their silence about non-delivery a year later that they don't actually need it.
    2. Rather little effort has been invested in pushing this dead-end feature: about a person week up front and some tinkering since.
    3. The broken branch wasn't permitted to stall other more useful work.
    4. The ticketing system is smart enough to say "too late, nevermind". If not automatically, it's a one-click op to mark it so.

    I sure wish all the broken projects I've lived through that were customer's thoughtless off-top-of-head whims turned to mini-death marches (or occasionally maxi-death marches) has ended this well.

    The Captcha wanted me to identify crosswalks. Which were unambiguous in the images shown. The AI disagreed with my choices, probably because it had also decided mistakenly that the clearly labeled bike lane was instead a crosswalk. I suppose from the POV of a self-driving car the outcome isn't too different: If you "see" something in that kind of area on a roadway a) it's probably slow moving compared to you, b) it can move unpredictably in any direction, and c) don't hit it.

    Sheesh. I find something perversely satisfying in a website dedicated to all the stupidity of commercial IT being used to train commercial artificial stupidity to drive cars badly thus causing not only business mayhem, but physical mayhem. Look out world, the WTF people are uppin' their game! It won't be pretty.

  • LCrawford (unregistered)

    It probably took Ronnie longer to write the WTF submission that it should have taken to find and fix the problem.

    TRWTF (and the likely culprit) is Javascript

  • Profke (unregistered)

    "Jane Bailey

    Jane Bailey is a [snip] blogger; in their day job, they're a renaissance person"

    ==> Is jane Bailey singular? or a group of people?

    I ask, because I am clearly too stupid to understand the basic principle of the singular "they", which has roots in English stretching back to at least the Medieval period, and then we get into a weird space of English being basically a totally different language.

  • Alistair (unregistered) in reply to WTFGuy

    That isn't AI - it is a consensus of other users who have answered the CAPTCHA.

    If Google has shown a picture of a US crosswalk to users from around the world, the mistake is not surprising.

  • RLB (unregistered) in reply to WTFGuy

    The Captcha wanted me to identify crosswalks. Which were unambiguous in the images shown. The AI disagreed with my choices, probably because it had also decided mistakenly that the clearly labeled bike lane was instead a crosswalk. I suppose from the POV of a self-driving car the outcome isn't too different: If you "see" something in that kind of area on a roadway a) it's probably slow moving compared to you, b) it can move unpredictably in any direction, and c) don't hit it.

    Can't have been an English AI, then, or it would've changed point c) to "run it off the road and blame it for your aggression" for the bike lane.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Profke

    Get on with the times, old codger (and/or) hag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Contemporary_usage

  • NZVC (unregistered) in reply to Applied Mediocrity

    Time is a physical concept denoting the relationship between cause and effect. It's mostly omnipresent, everpresent by definition and, to the best of our present knowledge, uniform in nature. There aren't many different "times" (other than different aspects of the phenomenon). You probably meant to say "align with your contemporaries". What you indeed have said is "align with those of your contemporaries whose ideas are uniqie/specific to the present era". Which is typically less wise than applying the test of time.

  • Abigail (unregistered)

    I was expecting a punch line, but this was just "Programmer couldn't fix it, and just left it there". Not really a WTF.

  • (nodebb) in reply to NZVC

    Eh, I believe I was simply trying to be edgy, if a tad obnoxious. If all those long words absolve me, I'll be glad to agree with you.

  • Kev (unregistered)

    "Kylie had literally never used VB before, having been primarily a C#.NET developer" - and a pretty poor one, if that was her excuse. Any decent C# programmer should be able to read VB without any issues, after a brief explanation, and vice versa.

  • Dave (unregistered)

    I'd like to remind everyone that Jane Bailey is a real person, who is likely to be reading these comments. And one who's volunteered their time to write this story for us, however unsatisfying the ending may be. At least try and be polite, if you can't be nice.

  • (nodebb) in reply to WTFGuy

    I sure wish all the broken projects I've lived through that were customer's thoughtless off-top-of-head whims turned to mini-death marches (or occasionally maxi-death marches) has ended this well. I had a customer... the CEO would tell the data-entry person that he wanted this or that, and she ignored the first two times he said it because usually he forgot about it. She would notify us if he told her three times, and then we'd do it (and charge them).

    Addendum 2020-12-07 11:27: There's a line break after "...ended this well."

  • Sole Purpose Of Visit (unregistered) in reply to NZVC

    Nope. I'm with Applied Mediocrity on this one.

    The history of English grammar and usage is helpfully flexible: even authorities such as Fowler accept this basic principle.

    And as for the "singular" usage of "they," it's just a readjustment from the point in time (since you talk about time) where the version of Germanic "English" on the Viking side of the Danelaw (which lacked inflections based upon gender) collided with the version of Germanic "English" on the Saxon side. Of course, if you'd rather we went back to "authentic" English, what with feminine, masculine, neuter declensions, plus thees and thous and what-nots, then I applaud you for being consistent.

    I doubt you're being consistent, however.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Sole Purpose Of Visit

    I would expect that "they" is a PGP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_gender_pronoun

  • Jane (unregistered)

    Thanks Dave, but to be honest, I work with the material I'm given, so I don't take it personal if people feel the story is underwhelming. If you want better stories, please submit them so I have better material to work with :)

    (And yes, my pronouns are they/them but I am a singular person.)

  • A-nony-mouse... (unregistered)

    People use they in the singular all the time and don't even think about it:

    Person #1: I just got off the phone with a customer service representative... Person #2: Cool, what did they say?

  • Chris (unregistered)

    I agree that the lack of ability to debug this issue is the real WTF. We don't have enough information about where the problem is with that (programmer or application), but "I don't know why" seems a poor answer after so much time. There's lots of ways to debug, if a debugger and some logging functionality aren't available. E.g. you can have message boxes pop up to tell you what's happening at certain points, to prove what's been triggered, etc.

    Also, I have some experience with C#, and only minimal experience with VB.Net (actually, I think any VB I've dealt with has been VBA, the grossest variant). I might not know all the fine details of the language, but I would expect to be able to step through the logic and find any issues. Of course, if it's one of those "equals doesn't mean what you think it means" that you get with Javascript (or similar), then I can't help you.

  • sh_code (unregistered)

    "(Did you know you can mix and match classic ASP with ASP.NET and classic VBScript with VB.NET in the same solution? I didn't!)"

    no, I didn't either. thanks, I hate it.

  • 🤷 (unregistered) in reply to Kev

    Any decent C# programmer should be able to read VB without any issues, after a brief explanation, and vice versa

    Am a C# developer that has to work with VB as part of their day job, can confirm. The syntax is a little different, but it's really not that hard to figure out what "For Each ... Next" is supposed to do, if you are familiar with "foreach(x in y) { }".

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered) in reply to Chris

    Think so to, I seem to recall older VB stuff did have some odd quirk with checkbox controls. Depending on what you set the type to ("allowing" the shaded ambiguous setting was the tricky one) the way to handle the return type was actually very different. Assuming the checkbox control could be bound to a boolean would really kick you in the arse because it would let you do it, give no compile or runtime error, and then just not work properly.

    One of those things that was quite simple if you'd hit it before and RTFM, but could keep you guessing at first, or if you'd been away long enough to forget.

    But even with this old stuff, we're not compiling fortran overnight on a mainframe ... there's loads of ways to get down to each line/variable/bag of control properties and see where it goes wrong, and if you really can't just switch it to a combobox with yes/no/don't care and blame the weather!

  • radarbob (unregistered) in reply to Prime Mover

    TRWTF: The amendment was obviously not really wanted very much in the first place

    This is, sadly, familiar. Of course it is wanted but over time the customer had come to expect nothing from the programmers. An important department head told me this. Implicit is that the IT management had come to the same low, low expectations. The programmers too, as the code heartily resists their efforts. So it's management's fault. They can't get out of that rut and organize a re-write effort. This stuff is always a leadership issue.

  • James (unregistered) in reply to Dave

    Why don't you post this for Remy's articles?

  • James (unregistered) in reply to A-nony-mouse...

    The gender is indeterminate in your example.

  • James (unregistered) in reply to Applied Mediocrity

    None of the examples on that page use a singular they for a specific person.

  • (nodebb) in reply to NZVC

    You've never heard of Einsteinian relativity then, I take it.

  • radarbob (unregistered) in reply to 🤷

    but it's really not that hard to figure out what "For Each ... Next" is supposed to do ...

    I'll see your ForEach and raise - the horror show of a VB script web page I took over. I hate VBscript, and now I get nightmarish flashbacks every time I see a red cover Wrox programming book with the author holding his bearded chin in his hand.

  • (nodebb)

    Oh, dear fellow commenters. You think adding a feature to a classic-ASP web app is easy, and should be doable in a few days, eh?

    In a hybrid classic-ASP / Webforms dotnet app, no less, eh?

    Without breaking anything, eh?

    You must have lots of RAM and an SSD or two on your dev machine, because you live in your IDE's "Find All In Solution..." function.

    You must love code like dim sql: sql = "SELECT a, b, c " &_

    "FROM nasty_old_table"

  • nasch (unregistered)

    Singular "they" has been used for an indeterminate person for hundreds of years. That is, when you want to refer to a person, but don't know who in particular it is. "The driver of that car cut me off; maybe they didn't see me." I know there's a driver in the car, but I don't know who it is or anything about the person. What is new, as far as I know, is singular "they" to refer to a specific person whose identity is known.

    ‘Each man hurried . . . till they drew near . . . where William and his darling were lying together.’

    Each man - not a specific man.

    "Almost anyone under the circumstances would have doubted if [the letter] were theirs, or indeed if they were themself."

    Anyone - but no one in particular.

  • Kj (unregistered) in reply to OllieJones

    I STILL have to help people with classic asp issues with vbscript after 6 years of doing it.

    It's a braindead simple language that's just verbose. ActiveX Com can be a pain if you don't have the DLL source to debug but you can at least view the properties of the dll in VS so it's not horrifying..

    If you're not dealing with that particular pain,it's not the bad.

    People love to hate on it While primitive it isn't "hard" it's just time consuming and a learning pain if you don't actually know anything about the language and don't know how to use a debugger.

    The learning pain is worse because you'll think "I'll never have to maintain this again or anywhere else" BAD MOVE BRAIN

    1 week is sometimes too long for some simple features like a form addition or simple input validation check.

    Note: I've also done vb.net, C#, Rhino (Java + Javascript (compiled with xml literals), xslt transforms, powershell (later switched to python ) and database design for SQL Server

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