• Ulysses (unregistered)

    Bravo! Unlike yesterday's article, the link herein actually works. For wholesome values of "works." :p

  • P (unregistered)

    "TRWTF are sites that spend more time and energy on SEO than on providing helpful content."

    so, sites like TDWTF?

  • Junkfoodjunkie (unregistered)

    What a "surprise" that it was THAT site...

  • (nodebb)

    Knew what the site would be before I even did the search. Kek.

  • EmptyJay (unregistered) in reply to DocMonster

    Do you believe it's the site mentioned in the comments? Because I found it at the site mentioned in the main article.

    (I'm assuming calling sites out by name is bad form/not allowed.)

  • RLB (unregistered)

    Nah. Geeksforgeeks is the new expertsexchange.

  • (nodebb)

    I detest youtube tutorials. for pretty much anything actually, but for programming???

  • Dude (unregistered)

    I remember the old days when Google let you block results from specific sites from ever appearing in searches. That site was the only one I ever blocked, and it was glorious. Now the only way to do that is with something like scriptmonkey, and it's just not the same.

  • (nodebb)

    I think a code snippet like this shouldn't be provided not just because it's bad, but also because we don't want people who rely on such type of help, who don't understand why and how it works, to write production code at any level. I don't want bad code samples, and I don't want good ones. If you don't understand sorting and DOM manipulation yourself, don't write code. Go learn the fundamentals first. Otherwise it's like giving a high school graduate scalpel and asking him to perform melanoma removal basing on YouTube videos.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Mr. TA

    I don't want good ones [code samples]

    Speak for yourself. I do. Having examples makes things a lot easier for understanding how-to articles and tutorials. Frequently, the words aren't particularly clear, but a code sample is always precise, being made of code.

    If you don't understand sorting and DOM manipulation yourself, don't write code.

    How are people supposed to learn how to sort and how to manipulate the DOM without being exposed to code samples?

  • (nodebb)

    Bonus points for the innerHTML usage.

  • Just a Dev (unregistered) in reply to RLB

    Expert Sex Change? Sounds like a happening site...

  • (nodebb) in reply to Jeremy Pereira

    Code samples demonstrating a sorting algorithm, and code samples demonstrating DOM manipulation, are perfectly fine. What is not fine is this hodge podge final solution which does sorting and DOM and whatever else, which prevents the aspiring programmer from understanding the nuts and bolts. People don't learn from this; they use it, and maybe make ugly tweaks to it to fit their needs.

  • James (unregistered)

    I never realized that site was so bad, but I never used it for its code samples.

  • Appalled (unregistered) in reply to Dude

    Google blocks? Wow. Never thought of that. Much better than my old method of putting them in my LMHosts which didn't block them, just made them a 404, Not Found.

  • Colin (unregistered)

    Huh, the code sample was originally posted as part of a question not a solution. Maybe I missed the point of this site.

  • Brian Boorman (google)

    The irony of this article is that the page here at thedailywtf loads a JS file "custom.js" in the footer div element. That JS file contains a function getCookie(cname) that the comments show came from that very same "bad" web school site.

  • Jaime (unregistered)

    When I interview programmers, one of the things I do is show them bad code and ask them to evaluate it. I tell them up front that this is code that has been found and replaced and that the original developer no longer works here, so he can't be offended.

    I need to know that programmers have a level of thinking beyond "I need to get this thing working". That's the single most dangerous attitude for a programmer to have.

  • sizer99 (google)

    As part of a campaign to prove to my bosses at an old job that outsourcing was costing us more than it was worth (as if negative productivity wasn't enough) I spent long hours looking through code outsourced to India going 'oh this looks like a chunk, let's search it... sure enough, Stack Exchange' and documenting it.

    Their development process was entirely: I don't understand this, but I need to do this. Search on Stack Exchange. Find some code. Copy and paste it. Good. Now I need to do something else. Repeat. Now you have 10 completely unrelated pieces of code and the real 'work' begins: pound on it till you stop getting errors in the compile. It's done, ship it off insisting it works perfectly. If the customer finds any errors swear it's because the customer has a firewall and/or is using anti-virus and those must be disabled. If the customer actually calls your bluff and runs it on a PC without a firewall or AV just go back to insisting it works in India. If the customer points out your code can't possibly work anywhere claim it's an old version.

    Sorry, I'm still traumatized.

  • Somebody Somewhere (unregistered) in reply to sizer99

    Did your bosses ever come around, and acknowledge that maybe the outsourcing decision was not leading to the efficiency gains they had hoped for?

    ... please say either say yes, or no and the company collapsed later. I need either reinforced faith in humanity, or a good hit of schadenfreude.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Somebody Somewhere
    Did your bosses ever come around, and acknowledge that maybe the outsourcing decision was not leading to the efficiency gains they had hoped for?
    You must be new here. And by "here," I mean any company in the USof A
  • Some Ed (unregistered) in reply to Brian Boorman

    I don't think that's properly called irony.

    Back when I was first active on this site, it proudly ran some of the WTFest code I've ever seen. And this comes from someone who submitted enough stuff on here that I had something published. Possibly more than once. Also I used to work for a company where everybody I talked to agreed was freakishly similar to Initech. In many departments. I mean, none of their Swingline enthusiasts had a red stapler - at least, not until Swingline started selling them to capitalize on the merchandizing. But there were at least five departments where one could go down the Office space cast and match up a name to each Initech personality.

    I left before they finally upgraded from the worst version of community server ever, so I was shocked my first time back to see there was real forum software that didn't have the tag soup of death. But I feel it was a good move to start moving away from that.

    Now if only I could figure out why sometimes when I press backspace once, it deletes two characters, and other times I have to press backspace twice to delete one...

  • A-ROBOT (unregistered)

    They have a "Report Error" button at the bottom of the page. I sent them this article...

  • Brian Boorman (google) in reply to Some Ed

    It's not irony that code from the "bad school" is running on the website that is complaining about code from the "bad school"? One of the definitions of irony is:

    - a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.

    One certainly wouldn't expect a site that exposes WTFs to be coded with WTFs.

    sarcasm - the use of irony to mock or convey contempt.
  • anonymous (unregistered)

    It's not a bad site, actually. I often use it for looking up HTML or CSS tags/attributes and the occasional JavaScript function when I'm not using jQuery. I've also occasionally used their SQL stuff for figuring out compound queries from time to time.

    I've found some of their tutorials useful to find a starting point in getting around a new library/API but I can't comment on the code quality overall because I don't regularly use the tutorials. That particular page is bad but personally I avoid any tutorials that deal with specific tasks (like everything in their "how to" section) anyway and prefer stuff that helps you to get familiar with a particular platform/library/API/framework in general.

  • Future (unregistered)

    TRWTF is a language used specifically in frontend work that doesn’t have built in sorting functions.

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