The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

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.

Dummy Round

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-12-08

Different languages will frequently have similar syntax. Many a pointy-haired-boss has seen this similarity and thus assumed that, if their programmer knows C, then C++ should be easy, and if they know C++ then going into C# must be trivial. I mean, the languages look the same, so they must be the same, right? Boats and cars are steered by wheels, so clearly if you can drive a car you can pilot a boat, and nothing will go wrong.

Andreas S inherited some code that started at C/C++ and was then ported to C#. The original developers were the sort to reinvent wheels wherever possible, so it's no surprise that they kept that going when they moved into C#.

12 comments - Last comment @ 10:12

A Split in the Database

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-12-02

Oracle is… special. While their core product is their database software, what they actually sell is layers and layers of ERPs and HR systems that run on top of that database. And what they really make money on is the consulting required to keep those monsters from eating your company's IT team alive.

Because these ERPs are meant to be all things to all customers, you also will find that there are a lot of columns named things like attribute3. Your company's custom logic can stuff anything you want in there. "Do as thou wilt," as they say. And suffer the consequences.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2021-12-07

Two Comparisons, Hold the Case

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-12-01

There are a lot of times when we want string comparisons to be case insensitive. It's quite a lot of cases, so every language is going to give us a way to easily specify that's what we want.

Take, for example, this C# code, written by one of Robin's team-mates.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2021-12-03

Recent CodeSOD

Dummy Round

A Split in the Database

Two Comparisons, Hold the Case