Recent CodeSOD

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.

Jun 2020

Scheduling your Terns

by in CodeSOD on

Mike has a co-worker who’s better at Code Golf than I am. They needed to generate a table with 24 column headings, one for each hour of the day, formatted in HAM- the hour and AM/PM. As someone bad at code golf, my first instinct is honestly to use two for loops, but in practice I’d probably do a 24 iteration loop with a branch to decide if it’s AM/PM and handle it appropriately, as well as a branch to handle the fact that hour 0 should be printed as 12.

Which, technically, more or less what Mike’s co-worker did, but they did in in golf style, using PHP.

42 comments - Last comment @ 05:47

Synchronize Your Clocks

by in CodeSOD on

Back when it was new, one of the “great features” of Java was that it made working with threads “easy”. Developers learning the language were encouraged to get a grip right on threads right away, because that was the new thing which would make their programs so much better.

Well, concurrency is hard. Or, to put it another way, “I had a problem, so I decided to use threads. prhave twI Now o oblems.”

25 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-04

Try a Different Version

by in CodeSOD on

Back when I was still working for a large enterprise company, I did a lot of code reviews. This particular organization didn’t have much interest in code quality, so a lot of the code I was reviewing was just… bad. Often, I wouldn’t even need to read the code to see that it was bad.

In the olden times, inconsistent or unclear indentation was a great sign that the code would be bad. As IDEs started automating indentation, you lost that specific signal, but gained a new one. You can just tell code is bad when it’s shaped like this:

16 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-04

Don't be so Negative Online

by in CodeSOD on

It's fair to say that regardless of their many advantages, "systems languages", like C, are much harder to use than their more abstract cousins.Vendors know this, which is why they often find a way to integrate across language boundaries. You might write critical functions in C or C++, then invoke them in Python or from Swift or… Visual Basic 6.

And crossing those language boundaries can pose other challenges. For example, Python has a built-in boolean type. C, for quite a long time didn't. Which means a lot of C code has blocks like this:

30 comments - Last comment @ 04:55
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