The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Find the First Function to Cut

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-30

Sebastian is now maintaining a huge framework which, in his words, "could easily be reduced in size by 50%", especially because many of the methods in it are reinvented wheels that are already provided by .NET and specifically LINQ.

For example, if you want the first item in a collection, LINQ lets you call First() or FirstOrDefault() on any collection. The latter option makes handling empty collections easier. But someone decided to reinvent that wheel, and like so many reinvented wheels, it's worse.

6 comments - Last comment @ 12:55

The Wrong Kind of Character

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-29

Today's code, at first, just looks like using literals instead of constants. Austin sends us this C#, from an older Windows Forms application:

if (e.KeyChar == (char)4) {   // is it a ^D?
        e.Handled = true;
        DoStuff();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)7) {   // is it a ^g?
        e.Handled = true;
        DoOtherStuff();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)Keys.Home) {
        e.Handled = true;
        SpecialGoToStart();
}
else if (e.KeyChar == (char)Keys.End) {
        e.Handled = true;
        SpecialGoToEnd();
}

14 comments - Last comment @ 16:31

Objectifying Yourself

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-28

"Boy, stringly typed data is hard to work with. I wish there were some easier way to work with it!"

This, presumably, is what Gary's predecessor said. Followed by, "Wait, I have an idea!"

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-29

Tangled Up in Foo

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-24

DZ's tech lead is a doctor of computer science, and that doctor loves to write code. But you already know that "PhD" stands for "Piled high and deep", and that's true of the tech lead's clue.

For example, in C#:

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-25

Dating in Another Language

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-23

It takes a lot of time and effort to build a code base that exceeds 100kloc. Rome wasn't built in a day; it just burned down in one.

Liza was working in a Python shop. They had a mildly successful product that ran on Linux. The sales team wanted better sales software to help them out, and instead of buying something off the shelf, they hired a C# developer to make something entirely custom.

19 comments - Last comment @ 07:47

XJSOML

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-04-22

When Steve's employer went hunting for a new customer relationship management system (CRM), they had some requirements. A lot of them were around the kind of vendor support they'd get. Their sales team weren't the most technical people, and the company wanted to push as much routine support off to the vendor as possible.

But they also needed a system that was extensible. Steve's company had many custom workflows they wanted to be able to execute, and automated marketing messages they wanted to construct, and so wanted a CRM that had an easy to use API.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-23

The Variable Toggle

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-21

A common class of bad code is the code which mixes server side code with client side code. This kind of thing:

<script>
    <?php if (someVal) { ?>
        var foo = <? echo someOtherVal ?>;
    <?php } else { ?>
        var foo = 5;
    <?php } ?>
</script>

9 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-25

Static State

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-04-17

Today's Anonymous submitter was reviewing some C++ code, and saw this perfectly reasonable looking pattern.

class SomeClass
{
public:
	void setField(int val);
	int getField();
}

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-04-24