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Apr 22Classic WTF: Color Me Stupid
by in Feature Articles on 2022-05-30It's a holiday in the US today, so we're flipping back through the archives to remember a classic WTF. These colors don't run, because they'll trip over their own shoelaces. Original. --Remy
Andy's company develops solutions for "Industrial" handheld devices. To make deployment and updates easier, they each run a thin client so only the server is different from project to project. This client was written by a long-gone employee in the early nineties, and had barely changed since because it "just worked". Updating it was discouraged for fear of breaking backward-compatibility.
Andy's new project was the first chance he'd had to use it, so he asked a colleague if there was some code that could be used to interface with it. What Andy received was essentially a giant method which responded to the client by cycling through a switch-statement to decide what to paint next based on the current state of the client. Andy took the initiative to create a library for making servers for these things a bit less spaghetti-like, and to encourage this new-fangled concept of code-reuse.