The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The GUID Utillity

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-05-17

Let's say you saw a method called StrToGuid, in a C# codebase. Your first thought might be: "Wait, isn't there a built in parse? Well, I guess maybe they might do some sort of exception handling. But it still doesn't seem right." And then you'd take a look at the method signature and see that it takes both a string, and an integer named counter, and you'd think: "Wait, what?"

Henrik H had a similar experience. His team hired a new developer, someone with 15+ years of experience. This is what they contributed to the codebase:

20 comments - Last comment @ 03:23

An Animated Block

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-05-16

"There are a few more functions like this in the same file," writes Jenny, about today's submission. This is one which largely does speak for itself.

const gright = () => {
  setIscountright(isCountright + 1);
  if(isCountright === 0) {
    setIsleft(!isLeft);
    setIsfirstdot(!isFirstdot);
    setIssecdot(!isSecdot);
    setInfof('Once activated buttons on the right panel will appear');
    setIssquareleft(!isSquareleft);
    setIsanimBottRightIn(!isAnimBottRightIn);
  }
  if(isCountright === 1) {
    setIssecdot(!isSecdot);
    setIsthirddot(!isThirdtdot);
    setInfof('Tap on them to change content of the projection on the wall');
    setIselmscale(!isElmscale);
    setIssquareleft(!isSquareleft);
    setIsmap(!isMap);
    setIsmapdot(!isMapdot);
    setIsborderwhite(!isBorderwhite);
  }
  if(isCountright === 2) {
    setIsright(!isRight);
    setIsthirddot(!isThirdtdot);
    setIsfourthdot(!isForthdot);
    setInfof('Use the menu bar in top left corner to switch between pages');
    setIssquareleft(isSquareleft);
    setIsanimBottRightIn(!isAnimBottRightIn);
    setIselmscale(!isElmscale);
    setIsmap(!isMap);
    setIsmapdot(!isMapdot);
    setIsborderwhite(!isBorderwhite);
    setIsindicator(!isIndicator);

    setTimeout(():void => {
      setAnimain(false);
      setMainsec(true);
      setIsindicator(false);
      setIsindicator2(true);
    }, 1000);

    setTimeout(():void => {
      setMainsec(false);
      setMainth(true);
      setIsindicator2(false);
      setIsindicator3(true);
      setShowdone(true);
    }, 2200);
  }
}

16 comments - Last comment @ 2022-05-17

Nullable Booleans

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-05-12

Austin's team received a bug report. When their C# application tried to load certain settings, it would crash. Now, since this was a pretty severe issue in their production software, impacting a fair number of customers, everyone on the team dove in.

It didn't take Austin long to spot the underlying problem, which isn't quite the WTF.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2022-05-16

Observing the Observer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-05-11

In the endless quest to get asynchronous operations right, we're constantly changing approaches. From callbacks, to promises, to awaits, to observables. Observables are pretty straight forward: we observe something, like a socket or a HTTP request, and when something happens, we trigger some callbacks. In a lightly pseudocode version, it might look something like:

requestFactory.postFormRequest(url).subscribe(
    resp => myResponseHandler(resp),
    err => myErrorHandler(err),
    () => myRequestCompleteHandler()
)

22 comments - Last comment @ 2022-05-15

Counting Answers

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-05-10

Lacy's co-worker needed to collect groups of strings into "clusters"- literally arrays of arrays of strings. Of great importance was knowing how many groups were in each cluster.

Making this more complicated, there was an array list of clusters. Obviously, there's a code smell just in this data organization- ArrayList<ArrayList<String[]>> is not a healthy sounding type name. There's probably a better way to express that.

11 comments - Last comment @ 2022-05-15

Uniquely Unique

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-05-09

Giles's company has a hard time with doing things in the database.

In today's example, they attempt the very challenging task of generating unique IDs in a SQL Server database. Now, what you're about to see follows the basic pattern of "generate a random number and see if it's already been used", which is a fairly common anti-pattern, but it's managed to do this in some of the worst ways I've ever seen. And it can't even hide behind the defense of being written a long time ago- it's a handful of years old.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2022-05-15

Capital Irregularities

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-05-05

Carolyn's company has a bunch of stringly-typed enums. That's already a problem, even in Python, but the other problem is that they need to display these in a human readable format. So, "ProductCategory" needs to become "Product Category". Now, it's true that every one of these stringly typed enums follows the PascalCase convention. It's also true that the list of them is constantly growing.

So this is the method someone wrote for formatting:

25 comments - Last comment @ 2022-05-16

Exceptionally TF

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-05-04

Steve's predecessor knows: sometimes, stuff happens that makes you go "WTF". While Steve was reviewing some inherited PHP code, he discovered that this predecessor had built some code to handle those situations.

namespace WtfInc;

##use \Exception as Exception;

class WTFException extends \Exception
{

    public function __construct($message = null, $code = null)
    {
        if (! $message) {
            $message = "WTF!?";
        } else {
            $message = "WTF!? " . $message;
        }
        parent::__construct($message, $code);
    }
}

20 comments - Last comment @ 2022-05-15