The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Cancel Catch

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-30

"This WTF is in Matlab" almost feels like cheating. At one place I worked, somebody's job was struggling through a mountain of Matlab code and porting it into C. "This Matlab code looks like it was written by an alien," also doesn't really get much traction- all Matlab code looks like it was written by an alien. This falls into the realm of "Researchers use Matlab, researchers may be very smart about their domain, but generally don't know the first thing about writing maintainable code, because that's not their job."

But let's take a look at some MatLab Carl W found:

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-05-01

Lint Brush Off

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-28

A few years back, C# added the concept of "primary constructors". Instead of declaring the storage for class members and then initializing them in the constructor, you can annotate the class itself with the required fields, and C# automatically generates a constructor for you. It's all very TypeScript and very Microsoft, and certainly cuts down on some boilerplate.

Esben B's team isn't really using them in many places, but they are using a linter which is opinionated about them. So this in-line constructor causes the linter to complain:

17 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-30

The JSON Template

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-27

We rip on PHP a lot, but I am willing to admit that the language and ecosystem have evolved over the years. What started as an ugly templating language is now just an ugly regular language.

But what happens when you still really want to do things with templates? Allison has inherited a Python-based, WSGI application which rejects any sort of formal routing or basic web development best practices. Their way of routing requests is simply long chains of "if condition then invokeA elif otherCondition then invokeB". Sometimes, those conditions will directly set the MIME type on the HTTP response.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-30

Tune Out the Static

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-23

Henrik H (previously) sends us a simple representative C# line:

static void GenerateCommercilaInvoice()

13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-25

Comment Overflow

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-04-22

Today, we look at a representative comment, sent to us by Nona. This particular comment was in a pile of code delivered by an offshore team.

// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46744740/lodash-mongoose-object-id-difference/46745169

12 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-23

Turning Thirty

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-04-21

Eric O worked for a medical device company. The medical device industry moves slowly, relative to other technical industries. Medical science and safety have their own cadence, and at a certain point, iterating faster doesn't matter much.

Eric was working on a new feature on a system that had been in use for thirteen years. This new feature interacted with a database which stored information about racks of test tubes, and Eric's tests meant creating several entries for racks of test tubes. And that's when Eric discovered that the database only allowed thirty racks. Add any more, it would just roll right back over to one.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-23

Good Etiquette

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-20

"Here, you're a programmer, take this over. It's business critical."

That's what Felicity's boss told her when he pointed her to a network drive containing an Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet contained a pile of macros. The person who wrote it had left, and nobody knew how to make it work, but the macros in question were absolutely business vital.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-23

We'll Hire Better Contractors Next Time, We Promise

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-04-16

Nona writes: "this is the beginning of a 2100 line function."

That's bad. Nona didn't send us the entire JavaScript function, but sent us just the three early lines, which definitely raise concerns:

14 comments - Last comment @ 2026-04-20