Remy Porter

Computers were a mistake, which is why I'm trying to shoot them into space. Editor-in-Chief for TDWTF.

Mar 2012

Let Me Sleep on It

by in Feature Articles on

"Perl is a language for getting your job done," is the underlying philosophy of the language. The only right way to write a Perl program is whatever way works. The ultimate flexibility of Perl is a breeding ground for WTFs . That's doubly true when you're new to the language, like Dave once was.

To get Dave started with Perl, his boss paired him up with Alvin, the veteran Perl programmer. He'd been using Perl since version 4, and had a reputation for wielding regexes like a scalpel. After Dave had a few days of ramp up, Alvin started sending him code from their codebase so that Dave could try and understand how their applications worked.


Pure Eval

by in CodeSOD on

When Jeff saw a line like this one, he knew there was something terribly wrong in the code he had inherited.

eval(Application("buildCommon").toString());

He wasn't sure what was more troubling- the way the Application variable was being used, or the fact that C#, as a compiled language, doesn't have an eval statement.


The Strong Type

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"Null reference exception, what does that even mean?" Randy whined.

"You probably didn't initialize one of your variables," Bob said.