The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Legend

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2016-08-30

Old Peter’s company has a legend. It has been passed down through generations of programmers and staff through an oral tradition. Oh, from time to time, someone would be inspired to record the tale for posterity, but inevitably, the hard copy was recycled, the digital copy was lost.

It was 1982, and the German tech industry was booming. Old Peter’s company manufactured a line of 8-bit computers that were targeted towards businesses. Their targets were generally larger companies and government organizations- like Frequenzhof Busgesellschaft.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2016-09-06

Real Money

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-08-29

Paulo F was doing a little online banking with one of the largest banks in Brazil. He wanted to buy a pre-paid debit-card. He chose a value from the drop-down, for example R$50,00- fifty Reals. The site promised him a card loaded with R$200,00. It didn’t matter what he chose, the site offered him a completely different value.

Curious, he pulled up the element in the inspector.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2016-09-05

Accuracy in Comments

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2016-08-24

Comments are rough. I always take the stance that code should always be clear enough to explain what it does, but you’ll may need a comment to explain why it does that. I recently attended a talk by Sean Griffin (maintainer of Rails) who argued that commit messages should accomplish that goal, since they can contain far more content than a code comment, and while code comments and code can drift apart and cease to be accurate, commit messages are always linked to the point-in-time when they were made. Donald Knuth, on the other hand, might argue that code should annotate comments instead of the opposite.

Regardless of the method we use, I think most of us would agree that code needs some documentation in the same way it needs tests: it should exist, but we don’t want to have to create it.

33 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-09

An Angular Watch

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-08-22

Let’s talk a little bit about front-end development. Even at its best, it’s terrible- decades of kruft mixed with standards and topped off with a pile of frameworks that do their best to turn this mess into a cohesive whole.

Jameson is suffering through this, and his suffering is the special level of front-end suffering known as “Angular”. Angular bolts Model-View-Controller semantics on top of HTML/JS/CSS, and its big selling point is that it makes two-way data-binding trivially easy.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2017-01-26

Location Not Found

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-08-17

Let’s say you have a collection of objects which contain geographic points. You want to find a specific item in that collection, and then extract the lat/lon of that item. You might write code like:

    var point = userGeoPositions.Where(x => x.userId = userId);
    decimal lat = point.Latitude;
    decimal lon = point.Longitude;

37 comments - Last comment @ 2016-09-08

Drugsort

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-08-15

I did a brief contract with Hershey, the candy manufacturer, once. The biggest thing I recall from the experience was that they had bowls full of candy all over the place. You could just grab them by the handful.

I bring this up, because Brenda worked for a pharmaceutical company, and I can only assume that there are bowls full of random drugs scattered around, and someone has been chowing down on them by the handful. That’s the most logical explanation for the following code:

35 comments - Last comment @ 2016-08-23

Constantly Extended

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-08-11

Imagine you’re a financial institution. You’ve built an application that processes financial transactions, and there are a number of flags that need to be set as constants to determine application behavior.

You might choose to write code like this:

35 comments - Last comment @ 2023-11-15

Compatibly Backward

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2016-08-09

I took my first official programming class circa 1997, and that year was notable, only because it was the last years that class was taught using Turbo Pascal. In future years, it was taught in C++. For the teacher, this was quite the transition. To help her make the transition, at the end of the course, she spent a few days teaching us basic C++, so she’d be more ready for the following class, and we got a little bonus education.

As far as I know, future runs of the class went just fine. I bring this up, because Frank had some co-workers who needed to make the exact same transition, from Turbo Pascal to C++. They may have done it a bit less gracefully. When reviewing some of the C++ they wrote, Frank spotted lots of code like:

51 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-10

Reader Appreciation Day

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2016-08-03

In lieu of a traditional WTF, I want to use today’s post to talk about the real WTF, or at least the source of all the WTFs we get to write about: our readers.

We’ve got great writers here, and every time I hit “publish” on one of their articles, I’m happy with what’s about to go out to the world. They do a great job building funny, entertaining narratives that highlight some of the unique challenges of working in IT. We get great support from our sponsors, who fund the site and keep it running.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2016-08-07

Take a Moment to Reflect

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-08-02

Modern object-oriented languages tend to support the concept of “reflection”. Reflection lets you inspect an object and find out its methods and invoke them dynamically. If you’re building extensible frameworks where you’re handling objects where their type might not be known until runtime, it can be very useful. On the other hand, if you’re using a strongly typed language and find yourself in this situation frequently… you’re probably doing something wrong.

For that reason, when Adam encounters calls to method.invoke() in Java programs, he gets suspicious. So, when he saw this:

34 comments - Last comment @ 2016-08-04