Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Something I saw today (typing from memory):

code:

...
try
{
    DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z");
    // TODO: Check that this is the right format

    date = dateFormat.parse(someString);
}
catch (ParseException pe)
{
    return true;
}
...

No, it was not the right date format.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2010 08:34

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 08:06

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Hi all! I saw a new code pattern today that I think has the potential to revolutionise the industry and I wanted to share it with you. I call it antipolymorphism. In general it looks like this:

code:


public class ClassB extends ClassA
{
    ...
}

public class ClassA
{
    public void someMethod()
    {
        if (this instanceof ClassB)
        {
            // do something
        }
        else
        {
            // do a different thing
        }
    }
}

Quite powerful I think you'll agree, and the advantages of keeping all your logic in the one place rather than scattered amongst different files cannot be overstated.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2010 00:58

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Dijkstracula posted:

Indeed, I recall doing Contra Duck's antipolymorphism back in my first semester of CS. I think it's awfully low-hanging fruit _{unless it's absolutely hysterical}

I had my share of laughs back when I used to take first year CS classes at uni, but sadly my last example was from industry. Thank god for code reviews though!

# ¿ Mar 2, 2010 11:52

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

The whole thing is a troll and it's brilliant.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2010 04:04

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

TRex EaterofCars posted:

Yup, that's the web application servlet context and request being passed in. To a job. That runs via Quartz.
Also, processFulfillmentItems is even larger than this and has around 15 exit points.
gently caress.

Well that's just stunning. Congratulations

# ¿ Sep 24, 2010 02:16

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

shrughes posted:

Real programmers

Using this phrase is a horror.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2010 04:54

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Here's one I found today. By no means the worst that this thread has ever seen but definitely something that could be simplified. (names have been changed)

code:

    public Boolean getAaa()
    {
        Boolean bbb = getBbb();

        if (BooleanUtil.isTrue(getCcc())
                && BooleanUtil.isTrue(bbb))
        {
            return Boolean.TRUE;
        }

        if (BooleanUtil.isTrue(getCcc())
                && BooleanUtil.isFalse(bbb))
        {
            return Boolean.FALSE;
        }

        if (BooleanUtil.isFalse(getCcc()))
        {
            return Boolean.FALSE;
        }

        return Boolean.FALSE;

    }

# ¿ Oct 20, 2010 07:56

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Plorkyeran posted:

Unless it solves k-SAT or something, I think having something named BooleanUtil might be a horror just by itself.

It's just there to avoid NullPointerExceptions in cases where the Boolean is null which actually was a possibility in this case. The fact that it's using a homegrown 'BooleanUtil' class instead of the perfectly good apache-commons BooleanUtils class is probably is a horror though!

# ¿ Oct 20, 2010 09:53

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Janin posted:

He's implying that Haskell isn't imperative, so yes, he is

Also, some ridiculous percentage (like 75-85%) of OCaml and Haskell programmers work in finance. It's like saying "I'm so glad I'm going to work in the games industry, so I don't have to write in C"

But what percentage of developers in finance work in Haskell or OCaml?

# ¿ Mar 8, 2011 02:06

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

code:

screenField_disabled=not(not(item.isViewOnly))

I have found 21 of these so far

# ¿ Mar 31, 2011 03:57

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Hammerite posted:

http://falconpl.org/index.ftd?page_id=facts

Witness the power of facts!

Wow, check out that performance, it's three times faster than Perl _{at executing an empty loop}!

# ¿ May 12, 2011 01:55

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

I'd call them an ambulance.

# ¿ May 24, 2011 06:07

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

TheresaJayne posted:

I cant really post the code that makes me cry...

its a single "small" java class, part of a bean for an article on a website.

15448 lines long,
113 lines of import statements,

and where i worked, only the senior devs were allowed to make changes in case anyone else broke it.

the next largest class was a paltry 5000 lines (and it was extended from this one)

/me sits down and weeps some more at the inhumanity of the class...

oh and this is a key part of a live website needing low latency

15888 lines, 230 imports :smith:

# ¿ Jul 7, 2011 01:58

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

TheresaJayne posted:

if its called Article.java,

say hi to the guys there

and i see they added more stuff, did the GWT stuff go in then

When I first saw your post I thought "Oh dear, that sounds awfully familiar", but no, mine is an entirely separate 15,000 line horror. There is a part of me that desperately wants to refactor this beast but the part of me that doesn't want to be responsible for it is overriding it.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2011 14:25

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

LOOK I AM A TURTLE posted:

Bravo

# ¿ Aug 18, 2011 10:55

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Wheany posted:

Does any university offer a course like "Learn not to be a poo poo coder by looking at other people's poo poo code"

Because I bet you could get infinite material from old programming assignments (anonymized, of course)

Eh, looking at terrible student code isn't going to accomplish anything. If you want to learn you need to seek out terrible code written by professionals.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2011 09:40

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Screw that, I want to know if you ever bought that 36kbps modem.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2011 01:58

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Zhentar posted:

They've probably been trained not to trust performance testing thanks to horribly inaccurate results from tests run by the same kind of people who think that stuff counts as encryption.

My performance testing story: A client was once very upset that our new release was performing 20% slower in their performance tests. After about two weeks it came out that they had tried to run the test at the same time and on the same machines as another system's performance test.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2012 23:36

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

hobbesmaster posted:

I'm not sure whether this makes me laugh or cry...

Lets see here:

I'm assuming they're not eating their own dogfood here?

You'd think they would learn after the Zune leap year bug in 2008.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2012 23:31

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Contero posted:

Yep, seen this one before :smith:

# ¿ Apr 29, 2012 01:31

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

McGlockenshire posted:

The formats understood by strtotime are very well-defined. As long as you're not throwing pathologically poorly formed input at it, it works pretty darn well.

Letting users type "+8 weekdays" in a date field and have it just work is pretty nifty.

Here's the problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

# ¿ Oct 3, 2012 08:06

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

code:

boolean aTrueValue = true;
boolean aFalseValue = false;

It's been in the codebase for 7 years and the values of true and false haven't changed yet, but if it ever does we are prepared for it.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2013 02:08

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

VRML's comeback begins now!

# ¿ Mar 22, 2013 00:24

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Manslaughter posted:

A new low has been reached.

After so many time-related horrors it's refreshing to see the other dimensions getting a run.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2014 02:22

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

HORATIO HORNBLOWER posted:

Five or six years, easily.

Yeah, one of my clients is in the middle of a major project to upgrade to IE8 right now.

(kill me)

# ¿ Mar 11, 2014 06:57

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

revmoo posted:

I really don't get people that don't like using SCM. It makes your life so much easier in so many ways.

I don't like having to learn new things when the current method has worked so well* up to now.

_{* Except for all those horrible horrible catastrophes.}

# ¿ Jun 5, 2014 08:02

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Coding horror - dealing with the memory limitations of a Java 5 application running on 32 bit Windows XP in the year 2014.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2014 02:18

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Coding horror: Finding out that a project which you previously estimated at over 3000 days work has been promised to the client to be delivered by the end of October.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2014 04:00

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

b0lt posted:

Coding horror: Estimating that a project will take over 3000 days of work

Horrible monolithic enterprisey bank projects take a lot of time!

Volmarias posted:

I hope that you've already written CYA emails about how there's no way in hell that you're meeting this deadline.

Way ahead of you there. It's very frustrating, 5 years ago this company used to make stupid promises like that all the time but I've done a ton of work to get us to a point where we actually have reasonable project plans that are delivered on time and on budget without resorting to the usual "crunch time" bullshit and now with a single comment it's all been undone.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2014 06:09

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

pliable posted:

This is my favorite if-else block in the entire world. I'm a pretty lovely programmer but man, I've at least never done poo poo like that.

I mean, how does one not even see that the whole block will literally do the same exact thing?

At least they managed to chain together their if/else in a normal way, unlike the example I ran into today at work...

code:

        if (a.getSomething() == null)
        {
            a.setSomeValue(false);
        }
        else
        {
            if (a.getSomething() == null)
            {
                a.setSomeValue(false);
            }
            else
            {
                /* do some other stuff */
            }
        }

The first condition was originally different but was changed in some shoddy refactoring. It then didn't get picked up in review, and of course screwing with the conditions here produced a really subtle but nasty bug.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2014 07:41

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

QuarkJets posted:

Hypothetically, a.getSomething() could modify some data that results in the next a.getSomething() returning something different. For instance, if it was iterating over some data, then you'd definitely expect the second call of a.getSomething() to return something new

That code is still poo poo anyway, and it's probably not what's happening

I checked that myself when I saw it but no it was just a standard Java accessor

# ¿ Sep 12, 2014 10:48

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

JawnV6 posted:

Imagine you've got a nontechnical superior asking you for the biggest semi-defensible LOC count you could come up with. Calling into a library? Include the library's wc -l count. Don't go gettin' fancy with some grep -c ';' nonsense, we want a big number.

Yeah I has a manager once who wanted to know how many lines of code were written for a project. I gave him a big number that included all the changes in config files and other non-code things and he was happy.

Contra Duck fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Sep 30, 2014

# ¿ Sep 30, 2014 01:21

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

This is a timely discussion because our work is migrating to git right now and I'm trying to convince them to not split up into dozens of small repos like we do right now with cvs. Good to have some ammo and some options to present to them on Monday. Thanks everyone!

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 11:38

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

"Division is a very costly operation so I optimised it"

# ¿ May 20, 2015 06:33

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Is the thing you inherited is a first year CS assignment?

# ¿ Jun 4, 2015 07:55

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

They read a thing about varargs that mentioned object arrays, so...

# ¿ Jun 4, 2015 09:09

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

Naming things is easy, just call things exactly what they are and everything becomes really easy to read.

code:

public class MortgageInsuranceCalculationDataCalculateMortgageInsuranceRequestTransformerImpl extends AbstractTransformer implements MortgageInsuranceCalculationDataCalculateMortgageInsuranceRequestTransformer

# ¿ Aug 7, 2015 07:30

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

I used to be confused why a webservice was giving me dates like "09-07-10007" until I realised they were storing records with no end date as "99999999" and the webservice was just adding 99 months and 99 days to Jan 1 9999.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2016 01:35

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

Was this epic? Cuz that sounds like something I could explain if it was .

Nah on the other end was some monolithic banking mainframe where 'null' wasn't an option so they used a bunch of bizarre workarounds instead.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2016 01:28

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 08:06

Contra Duck: Nov 4, 2004; #1 DAD

bobthecheese posted:

php:

<?
function is_equal($val1, $val2) {
    if ($val1 == $val2) {
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}
?>

After reading this thread for a years, I can't tell if this is bad because it's just dumb code or if it's actually needed because php equality testing is that broken

# ¿ Jul 15, 2016 03:04

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!