The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Scheduling your Terns

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-06-04

Mike has a co-worker who’s better at Code Golf than I am. They needed to generate a table with 24 column headings, one for each hour of the day, formatted in HAM- the hour and AM/PM. As someone bad at code golf, my first instinct is honestly to use two for loops, but in practice I’d probably do a 24 iteration loop with a branch to decide if it’s AM/PM and handle it appropriately, as well as a branch to handle the fact that hour 0 should be printed as 12.

Which, technically, more or less what Mike’s co-worker did, but they did in in golf style, using PHP.

46 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-05

Synchronize Your Clocks

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-06-03

Back when it was new, one of the “great features” of Java was that it made working with threads “easy”. Developers learning the language were encouraged to get a grip right on threads right away, because that was the new thing which would make their programs so much better.

Well, concurrency is hard. Or, to put it another way, “I had a problem, so I decided to use threads. prhave twI Now o oblems.”

25 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-04

Try a Different Version

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-06-02

Back when I was still working for a large enterprise company, I did a lot of code reviews. This particular organization didn’t have much interest in code quality, so a lot of the code I was reviewing was just… bad. Often, I wouldn’t even need to read the code to see that it was bad.

In the olden times, inconsistent or unclear indentation was a great sign that the code would be bad. As IDEs started automating indentation, you lost that specific signal, but gained a new one. You can just tell code is bad when it’s shaped like this:

16 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-04

Don't be so Negative Online

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-06-01

It's fair to say that regardless of their many advantages, "systems languages", like C, are much harder to use than their more abstract cousins.Vendors know this, which is why they often find a way to integrate across language boundaries. You might write critical functions in C or C++, then invoke them in Python or from Swift or… Visual Basic 6.

And crossing those language boundaries can pose other challenges. For example, Python has a built-in boolean type. C, for quite a long time didn't. Which means a lot of C code has blocks like this:

29 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-04

This is Your Last Birthday

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-05-28

I have a philosophy on birthdays. The significant ones aren’t the numbers we usually choose- 18, 21, 40, whatever- it’s the ones where you need an extra bit. 2, 4, 8, and so on. By that standard, my next birthday landmark isn’t until 2044, and I’m a patient sort.

Christian inherited some legacy C# code which deals in birthdays. Specifically, it needs to be able to determine when your last birthday was. Now, you have to be a bit smarter than simply “lop off the year and insert this year,” since that could be a future birthday, but not that much smarter.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-02

Is We Equal?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-05-27

Testing for equality is hard. Equal references are certainly equal, but are equal values? What does it mean for two objects to “equal” each other? It’s especially hard in a language like JavaScript, which is “friendly” about type conversions.

In JavaScript land, you’re likely to favor a tool like “lodash”, which provides utility functions like isEqual.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-02

Checking Your Options

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-05-21

If nulls are a “billion dollar mistake”, then optional/nullable values are the $50 of material from the hardware store that you use to cover up that mistake. It hasn’t really fixed anything, but if you’re handy, you can avoid worrying too much about null references.

D. Dam Wichers found some “interesting” Java code that leverages optionals, and combines them with the other newish Java feature that everyone loves to misuse: streams.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-03

A Maskerade

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-05-20

Josh was writing some code to interact with an image sensor. “Fortunately” for Josh, a co-worker had already written a nice large pile of utility methods in C to make this “easy”.

So, when Josh wanted to know if the sensor was oriented in landscape or portrait (or horizontal/vertical), there was a handy method to retrieve that information:

20 comments - Last comment @ 2020-05-22