The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Recent Representative Line

A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.

What the FFFFFFFF

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-05-20

Combining Java with lower-level bit manipulations is asking for trouble- not because the language is inadequate to the task, but because so many of the developers who work in Java are so used to working at a high level they might not quite "get" what they need to do.

Victor inherited one such project, which used bitmasks and bitwise operations a great deal, based on the network protocol it implemented. Here's how the developers responsible created their bitmasks:

15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-05-21

Identifying the Representative

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-05-19

Kate inherited a system where Java code generates JavaScript (by good old fashioned string concatenation) and embeds it into an output template. The Java code was written by someone who didn't fully understand Java, but JavaScript was also a language they didn't understand, and the resulting unholy mess was buggy and difficult to maintain.

Why trying to debug the JavaScript, Kate had to dig through the generated code, which led to this little representative line:

11 comments - Last comment @ 2025-05-22