The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Modern Art: The Funnel

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-05-29

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and when it's a picture of code, you could say that it contains a thousand words, too. Especially when it's bad code.

A 35 line enum definition which channels down to a funnel shape, I apologize for not providing the code in textual form, but honestly, this needs to be seen to be believed

Here we have a work of true art. The symmetry hearkens back to the composition of a frame of a Wes Anderson film, and the fact that this snippet starts on line 418 tells us that there's more to this story, something exotic happening just outside of frame. The artist is actively asking questions about what we know is true, with the method calls? —I think they're method calls— which take too many parameters, most of which are false. There are hints of an Inner Platform, but they're left for the viewer to discover. And holding it all together are the funnel-like lines which pull the viewer's eyes, straight through the midline, all the way down to the final DataType.STRING, which really says it all, doesn't it? DataType.STRING indeed.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-01

Aggregation of Concatenation

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-05-22

A few years back, JSON crossed the “really good hammer” threshold. It has a good balance of being human readable, relatively compact, and simple to parse. It thus has become the go-to format for everything. “KoHHeKT” inherited a service which generates some JSON from an in-memory tree structure. This is exactly the kind of situation where JSON shines, and it would be trivial to employ one of the many JSON serialization libraries available for C# to generate JSON on demand.

Orrrrr… you could use LINQ aggregations, string formatting and trims…

14 comments - Last comment @ 2018-05-23

Return of the Mask

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-05-16

Sometimes, you learn something new, and you suddenly start seeing it show up anywhere. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the name for that. Sometimes, you see one kind of bad code, and the same kind of bad code starts showing up everywhere. Yesterday we saw a nasty attempt to use bitmasks in a loop.

Today, we have Michele’s contribution, of a strange way of interacting with bitmasks. The culprit behind this code was a previous PLC programmer, even if this code wasn’t running straight on the PLC.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2018-05-20

A Bit Masked

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-05-15

The “for-case” or “loop-switch” anti-pattern creates some hard to maintain code. You know the drill: the first time through the loop, do one step, the next time through the loop, do a different step. It’s known as the “Anti-Duff’s Device”, which is a good contrast: Duff’s Device is a clever way to unroll a loop and turn it into a sequential process, while the “loop-switch” takes a sequential process and turns it into a loop.

Ashlea inherited an MFC application. It was worked on by a number of developers in Germany, some of which used English to name identifiers, some which used German, creating a new language called “Deunglish”. Or “Engleutch”? Whatever you call it, Ashlea has helpfully translated all the identifiers into English for us.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-05-30

CONDITION_FAILURE

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-05-14

Oliver Smith sends this representative line:

bool long_name_that_maybe_distracted_someone()
{
  return (execute() ? CONDITION_SUCCESS : CONDITION_FAILURE);
}

34 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-25

A Quick Replacement

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-05-10

Lucio Crusca was doing a bit of security auditing when he found this pile of code, and it is indeed a pile. It is PHP, which doesn’t automatically make it bad, but it makes use of a feature of PHP so bad that they’ve deprecated it in recent versions: the create_function method.

Before we even dig into this code, the create_function method takes a string, runs eval on it, and returns the name of the newly created anonymous function. Prior to PHP 5.3.0 this was their method of doing lambdas. And while the function is officially deprecated as of PHP 7.2.0… it’s not removed. You can still use it. And I’m sure a lot of code probably still does. Like this block…

15 comments - Last comment @ 2018-05-14

CHashMap

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-05-07

There’s a phenomenon I think of as the “evolution of objects” and it impacts novice programmers. They start by having piles of variables named things like userName0, userName1, accountNum0, accountNum1, etc. This is awkward and cumbersome, and then they discover arrays. string* userNames, int[] accountNums. This is also awkward and cumbersome, and then they discover hash maps, and can do something like Map<string, string>* users. Most programmers go on to discover “wait, objects do that!”

Not so Brian’s co-worker, Dagny. Dagny wanted to write some C++, but didn’t want to learn that pesky STL or have to master templates. Dagny also considered themselves a “performance junkie”, so they didn’t want to bloat their codebase with peer-reviewed and optimized code, and instead decided to invent that wheel themselves.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2018-05-10

The Same Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-05-03

Oh, dates. Oh, dates in Java. They’re a bit of a dangerous mess, at least prior to Java 8. That’s why Java 8 created its own date-time libraries, and why JodaTime was the gold standard in Java date handling for many years.

But it doesn’t really matter what date handling you do if you’re TRWTF. An Anonymous submitter passed along this method, which is meant to set the start and end date of a search range, based on a number of days:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2018-05-07

A Password Generator

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-05-02

Every programming language has a *bias* which informs their solutions. Object-oriented languages are biased towards objects, and all the things which follow on. Clojure is all about function application. Haskell is all about type algebra. Ruby is all about monkey-patching existing objects.

In any language, these things can be taken too far. Java's infamous Spring framework leaps to mind. Perl, being biased towards regular expressions, has earned its reputation as being "write only" thanks to regex abuse.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2019-04-30