The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classical Solutions

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-28

CSS classes give us the ability to reuse styles in a meaningful way, by defining, well, classes of styling. A common anti-pattern is to misuse classes and define things like "redTextUnderlined" as a CSS class. Best practice is that a CSS class should define the role, not the appearance. So that class might be better named "validationError", for example. A class will frequently bundle together a bunch of stylesheet properties into a single, meaningful name. That's the ideal approach, anyway.

Now, Olivia's predecessor had an… interesting philosophy of how to use CSS classes.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2023-11-27

Repetition is an Echo

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-27

Annie works in a bioinformatics department. There's a lot of internally developed code, and the quality is… special. But it's also got features that are on their critical path of doing their jobs.

One example is that, based on one input form, the next input form needs to display a drop down. The drop down elements don't change, but the individual item that's selected does. So, if the rank HTTP POST variable is set, we want to make sure the matching entry is selected.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-06

The Device Search

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-26

I started writing a paragraph about why this code Gilda found was bad, and then I had to delete it all, because I wasn't putting the entire block in context. At a glance, this looks almost fine, but I thought I spotted a WTF. But only when I thought about the fact that this C code runs inside of a loop that I realized the real problem.

rsts = get_device_by_id ( movq_p->nxt_device_id, &devc );
if ( ( rsts == CC_VL_SUCCESS ) &&
     ( strcmp ( devc.device_type, SPECIFIC_DEVICE ) == 0 ) )
{
  specific_device_flag = CC_VL_TRUE;
}




/*
 *	Process device...
 */
if ( specific_device_flag )
{
...
}

24 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-31

Tying Two Strings

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-25

Lets say you have a simple problem. You have a string variable, and you'd like to store that string in another variable. You have a vague understanding of string immutability and something about the way references work in C#, but you don't really understand any of that. So, what do you do?

Well, if you're Tina's co-worker, you do this:

25 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-31

Compiling Datasets

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-21

Managing datasets is always a challenging task. So when Penny's co-worker needed to collect a pile of latitude/longitude positions from one dataset and prepare it for processing in a C++ program, that co-worker turned to the tools she knew best. Python and C++.

Now, you or I might have dumped this data to a CSV file. But this co-worker is more… performance minded than us. So the Python script didn't generate a CSV file. Or a JSON document. Or any standard data file. No, that Python script generated a C++ file.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-01

Double Narcissism

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-20

In mythology, Narcissus was so enraptured by his own beauty that he turned away all potential lovers until he came across a still pool of water. Upon spying his reflection, he fell in love and remained there for the rest of his life. After his death, a narcissus flower grew in his place- a daffodil or jonquil.

One important element of Narcissus's myth is that while yes, he was incredibly self-absorbed, he was also beautiful. That's less true for this C# code from frequent commenter Sole Purpose Of Visit. There is nothing beautiful about this code.

33 comments - Last comment @ 2024-02-07

Paste Parse

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-19

Sandra (previously) is still working with Bjørn. Bjørn also continues to like keeping things… simple.

"Simple" for Bjørn is "do as much in PHP as possible since I am okay at PHP, including templating out JavaScript. If I have any third party libraries, just copy and paste them into the project and never, ever use a bundler because WebPack is scary."

16 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-20

The Wager

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-14

We've all been there. We need to make a change to the codebase or else. The right solution is going to take time and refactoring. There's a quick fix that will keep the production system from falling over and crushing the business. So you make the quick fix, with the idea that, eventually, you'll really fix it.

And eventually never comes.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-23

Exceptional Flags

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-13

Something I see in a lot of code, and generally dislike, is this pattern:

if (debug) {
    print("Some debugging message");
}

36 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-23

Busy Busy Busy

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-12

One of the common mistakes in a beginner programmer is to wait using a busy loop. Need to pause a program? for(int i = 0; i < SOME_LARGE_NUMBER;i++) continue;

There are a lot of good reasons to not do this, but in microcontroller land, sometimes you actually do want to wait this way. There may be better ways, but there also might not- it depends on your specific constraints.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-17

Switching Notes

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-11

"The app I work on is a 1.2MLOC big-ball-o-wtf," writes Mark B.

As with a lot of big piles of bad code, it's frequently hard to find a snippet that both represents the bad code and is concise enough to submit. In this case, the code in question shows a questionable grasp of both switch statements and enums.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-13

Stuttering Strings

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-06

Mario's team had a nasty stutter in the UI of their web application. Frequently, when going back to the server for data, the UI would just hang. The requests themselves were happening asynchronously, and it wasn't just network lag anyway- the server was able to serve up large JSON responses well within any reasonable timelines. Certainly nothing in the timing justified such a nasty UI hang. So what was going on?

Well, in many of the places where they were handling JSON responses, specifically large JSON responses, this code was copy-pasted in multiple places:

12 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-12

All the Single Objects

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-07-05

I have a bit of a vendetta against the Singleton pattern. It's not to say that I won't use it, it's just that it's a pattern that gets overused and misapplied. The result is, instead of guaranteeing that only one instance of an object exists (because there can be only one), and just reinvent global variables.

Today, George sends us some code that is in a Java factory class that constructs thread pools. In this case, the thread pool itself is returned as a singleton. I've got some questions about the logic of why that's the case, but that's what it is.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2022-07-06

Recent CodeSOD