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For some godawful reason, people like to explain object oriented concepts via analogy to biological taxonomies. I suppose it's easy to understand an "is-a" relationship (a cat is a mammal), but the down side is you get a complex and increasingly leaky analogy that over-emphasizes the importance of inheritance.
That's not to slight Alan's choice of using it to anoymize today's code. It's just a broad frustration on my part.
Robert G sends us a WTF from the outside, but I think we can come up with some hypotheses about what actually happened.
Robert was traveling by train. For complicated train reasons, the car he was seated on was not actually scheduled to continue with the train he was booked to ride, the replacement car missed its scheduled arrival, and the result was that Robert was left at a station needing to rebook his travel.
A junior dev on the team had a simple question: in Java, how do I correctly read user input from the CLI and act on it?
Now, we can wonder about a junior dev not having such basic knowledge, but maybe they're new to Java specifically. Who knows. But Robert's team has a senior on it who "likes to mentor". This senior has strong opinions about how to write software, extreme confidence in those opinions, and has somehow been around the company long enough that he knows where the bodies are buried and no one will fire him.
Many years ago, DJ got his start doing odd web development jobs for a low hourly rate. He was only 19 when he got started, and what he lacked in experience he made up for in being cheap to hire.
As I said, that was many years ago, and he has since learned a lot. But he still has some code from his very first "someone paid me for this" project. This particular function needed to pick a random bit of content from their database to display in the "right side" banner area. This is how DJ implemented it.
Today's anonymous submitter sends us some legacy Java code.
The task is this: check what time it is. And fortunately, even in the older Java datetime libraries that were terrible, this was an easy task. You just needed to do something like new Date(), which constructs a date time object set to the current time. getTime() picks off just the time portion.
Today's anonymous submitter shares with us the function their company uses to validate authentication tokens.
public bool IsTokenValid(string token)
{
//TODO
return true;
}
Fritz's team needed to see if one point was within a certain distance from a center point. You or I would likely try and answer this question using a simple distance calculation, since that's the question we're trying to answer. But what if you didn't understand distances at all? Then you could write this little piece of genius.
private bool IsWithin(Point point, int radius)
{
for (int x = -radius; x < radius + 1; x++)
{
for (int y = -radius; y < radius + 1; y++)
{
if ((PositionX == point.X + x) && (PositionY == point.Y + y))
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
Nikolai M's team had a flaky CI/CD build. About 0.5% of the time, one of their tests would fail: frequent enough to be annoying, but not so frequent that it motivated management to assign anybody to investigate. Nikolai eventually dug in, taking the initiative.
Microsoft's implementation of UUIDs calls them GUIDs. The GUID is, per the docs, really just a wrapper around UUID algorithms, and supports a variety of different UUID variants. I'm sure at some historical point, this wasnt't true, and Microsoft had some weird internal algorithm. That's not really here nor there, but the test that was failing was failing because of an assertion relating to GUIDs.