The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

All the Pieces

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2013-03-25

So much bad code arises from the fact that people don’t know that there’s a better way. If a developer doesn’t know about “split” and “join” functions, they might write a cumbersome for loop to manipulate a string. If they don’t know about regexes, they might really overcomplicate some string munging . Or heck, maybe they don’t understand a for loop, and use a while instead.

Maurycy submits this PHP code. It’s hard to really understand how this particular version of the code came into being.

79 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-14

Accounting for Development

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2013-03-20

Karen glared across her desk at Tom. “Did you install Visual Studio on your computer?”

“Yes,” Tom replied, unsure why she radiated waves of fury at him.

129 comments - Last comment @ 2013-05-31

A Long Running Process

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2013-03-05

A process might run for a long time, and it’s important for code to ensure that the long-running process doesn’t crash unexpectedly. Alexander found this block of code, which carefully protects against overflows:

if (_totalSeconds < ulong.MaxValue)
{  
   _totalSeconds += 1;
}  
else
{  
   _totalSeconds = 0;  
}

90 comments - Last comment @ 2013-03-22