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Code Snippet Of the Day (CodeSOD) features interesting and usually incorrect code snippets taken from actual production code in a commercial and/or open source software projects.
"A little while back, someone introduced the concept of 'self-documenting' code to our team," writes Ryan L. "It was certainly a step forward, but it's somehow taken us two steps backwards. Consider, for example, the following code from an MVC controller."
Mar 12
if (TheFormIsInvalid()) return View("Index", form);
... snip ...
private bool TheFormIsInvalid()
{
return ModelState.IsValid == false;
}
"When the job ad specified that an 'enterprise' Senior Java Developer was needed, I knew I'd be in a treat for some enterprisey goodness," writes Chris B, "but what I didn't expect was the User Agent Detection Generation Framework. Here's what the API for this framework looks like."
"As part of my new role for a software development firm," writes David Mayer, "I was assigned to sift through some code looking for bugs in the dictionary and spellchecking system. That's how I came across a function called get_words_from_a_number_which_is_passed_as_a_perimeter_into_this_function."
"One definition of the word perimeter is 'the length of a line', which seems ironic given that all the variables used are obscene in length. Incidentally, one such perimeter defines 'pass-a-number' which indicates to the function that the second perimeter will be a number. But given this function converts numbers to words, I fail to see why you would 'pass-a-letter'. "
"Working through a pretty ugly project, I came across this C# beauty," Matt B writes, "at first, I was unsure of what it did. I was utterly perplexed until I took a second look at the function name. "
"It turns out, it produces a random string of letters. It was used to create a random ID for some URLs. Apparently, this developer was too proud for base 64 encoding, MD5, or some good old ASCII conversion."
"I was recently assigned to work on a project that had been abandoned by its developer," wrote George Z. "After I checked-out the code for the first time, I started sifting through hundreds of lines of bad syntax, and bad practices."
"After a good hour or two looking I came across this little gem."
"At my company, the powers-that-be determined that, because we rejected a lot of job candidates, my group was ineffective at hiring new employees,"Kendall writes, "thus, the responsibility of hiring new developers was shifted to a group much more proficient at hiring: human resources."
"That has been going about as well as you might expect, and to make a long story short, we were told to handle any 'knowledge gaps' with training. And thus, one of the very first training jobs I give to new employees is to develop a method that translates Roman Numbers to Decimal Numbers. Most struggle with the challenge, but one new hire actually managed to solve the problem:
