The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classic WTF: A Dumbain Specific Language

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2026-09-07

It's a holiday here in the US, a celebration of labor, so we're reaching back through the archives for a story about an attempt to be labor saving that was not successful. Original. --Remy

I’ve had to write a few domain-specific-languages in the past. As per Remy’s Law of Requirements Gathering, it’s been mostly because the users needed an Excel-like formula language. The danger of DSLs, of course, is that they’re often YAGNI in the extreme, or at least a sign that you don’t really understand your problem.

XML, coupled with schemas, is a tool for building data-focused DSLs. If you have some complex structure, you can convert each of its features into an XML attribute. For example, if you had a grammar that looked something like this:

3 comments - Last comment @ 11:04

Heating Up

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-09-03

A common option for retrofitting heating and cooling into older homes is a mini-split, frequently tied to a heat pump. They're (relatively) cheap to install, energy efficient, and can be added without substantial modifications to the home. They also, annoyingly, are mostly controlled via IR remotes, making them challenging to wire up to home automation or even a household thermostat.

People have made solutions, and today's code comes from one of those solutions. Which, I want to stress, this code comes from an open source project for home automation, so it's not the code that's wrong, here. At first I thought it was, and had a moment of, "I'm not going to pick on some hobby project," but then I realised the hobby project points at a deeper issue.

35 comments - Last comment @ 11:12

What You Measure

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-09-02

Rachel joined a new team which was proudly "metrics driven". When she first met with her boss, Zane, he explained his thinking.

"We need to be data-driven to make good decisions, right? We're a manufacturing company. We make widgets. At the end of the day, we need to make the most widgets for the lowest cost of goods sold. So we track that, and that feeds into every decision."

27 comments - Last comment @ 08:06

So Much Room

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-09-01

Today's representative comment ran out of room.

int maxLen = getColumnSize(session, "audit", "text_value1") - 16; // Leave some room for

22 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-04

The Big Family

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-08-27

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.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-31

Lock 'Em Dead

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-08-26

Kevin sends us an exception handler from C++. Let's see if we can spot what's going wrong:

catch (Exception::Deadlock)
{
   retry;
}

26 comments - Last comment @ 10:12

Both Ways Bug Me

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-08-25

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)))

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-29

We All Register This

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-08-20

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".

23 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-31