The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Dumbain Specific Language

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-20

I’ve had to write a few domain-specific-languages in the past. As per Remy’s Law of Requirements Gathering, it’s been mostly because the users needed an Excel-like formula language. The danger of DSLs, of course, is that they’re often YAGNI in the extreme, or at least a sign that you don’t really understand your problem.

XML, coupled with schemas, is a tool for building data-focused DSLs. If you have some complex structure, you can convert each of its features into an XML attribute. For example, if you had a grammar that looked something like this:

22 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-21

Mutex.js

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-18

Just last week, I was teaching a group of back-end developers how to use Angular to develop front ends. One question that came up, which did suprise me a bit, was how to deal with race conditions and concurrency in JavaScript.

I’m glad they asked, because it’s a good question that never occurred to me. The JavaScript runtime, of course, is single-threaded. You might use Web Workers to get multiple threads, but they use an Actor model, so there’s no shared state, and thus no need for any sort of locking.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-20

string isValidArticle(string article)

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-14

Anonymous sends us this little blob of code, which is mildly embarassing on its own:

    static StringBuilder vsb = new StringBuilder();
    internal static string IsValidUrl(string value)
    {
        if (value == null)
        {
            return "\"\"";
        }

        vsb.Length= 0;
        vsb.Append("@\"");

        for (int i=0; i<value.Length; i++)
        {
            if (value[i] == '\"')
                vsb.Append("\"\"");
            else
                vsb.Append(value[i]);
        }

        vsb.Append("\"");
        return vsb.ToString();
    }

37 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-21

A Bad Route

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-11

Ah, consumer products. Regardless of what the product in question is, therre’s a certain amount of “design” that goes into the device. Not design which might make the product more user-friendly, or useful, or in any way better. No, “design”, which means it looks nicer on the shelf at Target, or Best Buy, or has a better image on its Amazon listing. The manufacturer wants you to buy it, but they don’t really care if you use it.

This thinking extends to any software that may be on the device. This is obviously true if it’s your basic Internet of Garbage device, but it’s often true of something we depend on far more: consumer grade routers.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

Never Bother the Customer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-07

Matthew H was given a pretty basic task: save some data as a blob. This task was made more complicated by their boss’s core philosophy, though.

Never. Bother. The. Customer..

39 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

Gotta Get 'Em All

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-05

LINQ brings functional programming and loads of syntactic sugar to .NET languages. It’s a nice feature, although as James points out, it helps if your fellow developers have even the slightest clue about what they’re doing.

// some validation checking
var retrieveDocIdList = this.storedDocumentManager.GetAllForClientNotRetrieved(client.Id).Select(x => x.Id.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)).ToList();

retrieveDocIdList.ForEach(id => {
    var storedDoc = this.storedDocumentManager.Get(int.Parse(id))
// do some other stuff with the doc
});

28 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-12

Attention to Detail

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-08-31

The exotic and exciting life of the world-traveling contractor wasn’t exactly what Angie had been expecting. It mostly meant living in a dreary apartment on the outskirts of some city in a short drive from an industrial park where she’d go to try and keep 30-year old C code and their new ERP from fighting to the death. Six months later, she’d be off to the same apartment near the same industrial park in a different country.

When the crash came, it came hard. Hard enough that Angie ditched IT and got a temp job working in a customer service call-center for a greeting card company. She wasn’t exactly the best person on the phone, and nobody was giving her stellar marks for her cheerful demeanor during her quarterly review.

A vintage 'get well' card from 1949, with the text, 'How's the convalescent?/Down but not out'

24 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-07

Take a Byte of a Nibble

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-30

Imagine, if you will, that you have 64-bits of data. From this 64-bits of data, you need to extract a nibble, which contains the value that you care about. Now, I’m sure you’re imagining an integer with some bitmasks to extract the data, which is a perfectly sane approach.

Tomasz inherited some code from his company’s German office. It took the approach of taking the 64-bits and storing the 64-bits in an eight element byte array. Then, it extracted the values from that array with code looking like this:

28 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-06