The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Getter Setter Getter

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-11

Today's Java snippet comes from Capybara James.

The first sign something was wrong was this:

5 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-12

Upsert Yours

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-10

Henrik H sends us a short snippet, for a relative value of short.

We've all seen this method before, but this is a particularly good version of it:

30 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-12

Pretty Little State Machine

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-08

State machines are a powerful way to organize code. They are, after all, one of the fundamental models of computation. That's pretty good. A well designed state machine can make a complicated problem clear, and easy to understand.

Chris, on the other hand, found this one.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-12

Basically, a Smorgasbord

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2025-09-04

It's that time to take a look at a few short snippets.

Boolean values can hold true or false. But is that truly self documenting? I think we need clearer variable names for this. Certainly, the snippet Nonymous found thinks so:

28 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-11

Adding to the Argument

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-09-03

David G saw a pull request with a surprisingly long thread of comments on it. What was weirder was that the associated ticket was all about adding a single parameter to an existing method. What could be generating that much discussion?

How could adding an argument add to an argument?

6 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-08

Springs are Optional

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-08-28

Optional types are an attempt to patch the "billion dollar mistake". When you don't know if you have a value or not, you wrap it in an Optional, which ensures that there is a value (the Optional itself), thus avoiding null reference exceptions. Then you can query the Optional to see if there is a real value or not.

This is all fine and good, and can cut down on some bugs. Good implementations are loaded with convenience methods which make it easy to work on the optionals.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-02

The HTML Print Value

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-08-27

Matt was handed a pile of VB .Net code, and told, "This is yours now. I'm sorry."

As often happens, previous company leadership said, "Why should I pay top dollar for experienced software engineers when I can hire three kids out of college for the same price?" The experiment ended poorly, and the result was a pile of bad VB code, which Matt now owned.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-08-30

Not What They Meant By Watching "AndOr"

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-08-26

Today's awfulness comes from Tim H, and while it's technically more than one line, it's so representative of the code, and so short that I'm going to call this a representative line. Before we get to the code, we need to talk a little history.

Tim's project is roughly three decades old. It's a C++ tool used for a variety of research projects, and this means that 90% of the people who have worked on it are PhD candidates in computer science programs. We all know the rule of CompSci PhDs and programming: they're terrible at it. It's like the old joke about the farmer who, when unable to find an engineer to build him a cow conveyer, asked a physicist. After months of work, the physicist introduced the result: "First, we assume a perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum…"

11 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-08