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These fine folks make it possible to run The Daily WTF.
Some time ago, Charles shared with us some awful PHP, aka the most common sort. Today's code sample is maybe a little too big to sum up, but I'll let Charles take a crack at it.
It's so bad that even analyzing and laughing at it feels impossible. But it’s so bad, I couldn’t not share it.
Kevin sends us an exception handler from C++. Let's see if we can spot what's going wrong:
catch (Exception::Deadlock)
{
retry;
}
There are many cases where some sort of debugging block sneaks by, especially cases where we see preprocessors or templates working, which leave us with nonsense like if (true == false) running in production. But Codemonkey found a new twist on that sort of thing, in a SQL query being run in production.
WHERE (some conditions) AND (1 = 0 OR (1 = 1 AND (other conditions)))
The opposite of meritocracy is kakistocracy: the worst and least-qualified are the ones who rise to the top.
Get real familiar with that word, dear readers. I think you'll need it.
We have a couple from Foo (AKA Foo) today, include a special text copy-paste
Foo shared "I know you usually post image WTFs here, but here's a text output from chromium:
Today's maybe more of a "representative data sheet entry" than anything else.
Every developer has the experience of reading the documentation. If you've been at this for some time, you've probably read bad documentation. Documentation that is incomplete, inaccurate, or otherwise flawed. Or, my personal favorite, the brief time where Oracle tried to put all of its documentation into an Adobe Flex site (aka, a Flash application, not a real web app). That one had fun bonus features, like "breaking copy and paste" and "preventing you from deep linking to a piece of the documentation".
Matlab is special. Scientists and researchers love it. Programmers hate it, and not just because it uses 1-based arrays. I've worked on a number of projects where the task was "take this Matlab code and convert it to C so we can run it on an embedded CPU". Somehow, in that process, I've avoided learning much about Matlab.
Andre works on a team that uses Matlab to manage experimental scenarios. They wanted to do a simple task: generate a set of participant-specific images, store them in a database, and reference them later. Somewhere in the intersection of the database product they were using, the Matlab license they had, and other constraints, they discovered that there simply was no good way to do this.