The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Integral to a Database Read

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-06-05

One of the key points of confusion for people unfamiliar with Java is the distinction between true object types, like Integer, and "primitive" types, like int. This is made worse by the collection types, like ArrayList, which needs to hold a true object type, but can't hold a primitive. A generic ArrayList<Integer> is valid, but ArrayList<int> won't compile. Fortunately for everyone, Java automatically "boxes" types- at least since Java 5, way back in 2004- so integerList.add(5) and int n = integerList.get(0) will both work just fine.

Somebody should have told that to Alice's co-worker, who spends a lot of code to do some type gymnastics that they shouldn't have:

10 comments - Last comment @ 15:47

Anything and Everything

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-06-04

Today's short function comes from Janusz, and it's anything you want it to be:

public static function isAnything($data)
{
    return true;
}

22 comments - Last comment @ 06:14

Continuous Installation

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-06-03

A recent code-review on a new build pipeline got Sandra's attention (previously). The normally responsible and reliable developer responsible for the commit included this in their Jenkinsfile:

sh '''
if ! command -v yamllint &> /dev/null; then
	if command -v apt-get &> /dev/null; then
	apt-get update && apt-get install -y yamllint
	elif command -v apk &> /dev/null; then
	apk add --no-cache yamllint
	elif command -v pip3 &> /dev/null; then
	pip3 install --break-system-packages yamllint
	fi
fi
find . -name '*.yaml' -exec yamllint {} \\; || true
find . -name '*.yml' -exec yamllint {} \\; || true
'''

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-06-04