These fine folks make it possible to run The Daily WTF.
When discussing ternaries, we also have to discuss readability. While short and concise, they're in some ways too compact. But don't worry, Mark's co-worker has a wonderful simplification to ternaries. This representative line is a pattern used throughout the codebase.
pnlErrorMessage.Visible = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(errorMsg) ? true : false;
"Grocery stores are going too far with their energy foods" charged Tim DG. "I was just looking for some salads to go with my BBQ," he complained. "I'm not sure they sell what I'm looking for." I've seen what your kin put in their Huzarensaladen, Tim, so I'm not entirely surprised about the Duracells.
We all know that building SQL queries via string concatenation, and then sending them to the database, is just begging for fragile code and SQL injection attacks. But, what if the bad part is the "sending them to the database" part? Has anyone ever thought about that?
Kris's predecessor has.
Many years ago, Sam was obeying Remy's Law of Requirements Gathering ("No matter what your requirements actually say, what your users want is Excel") and was working on a web-based spreadsheet and form application.
The code is not good, and involves a great deal of reinvented wheels. It is, for example, Java based, but instead of using any of the standard Java web containers for hosting their code, they wrote their own. It's like Java Servlets, but also is utterly unlike them in important and surprising ways. It supports JSP for views, but also has just enough surprises that it breaks new developers.
One of the first things anyone learns about object oriented programming is the power of inheritance and overriding functions. Isn't it great that you can extend or modify the implementation of a function in your derived classes? Don't you wish you could just do that for every function? Aash's co-worker certainly does.
@Override
public boolean isEnabled() {
if (!super.isEnabled()) {
return false;
}
return true;
}
One of the clients for Rudolf's company was getting furious with them. The dev team was in constant firefighting mode. No new features ever shipped, because the code-base was too fragile to add new features to without breaking something else. What few tests existed were broken. Anyone put on the project burned out and fled in months, sometimes weeks, and rarely after only a few days.
Rudolf wasn't too pleased when management parachuted him into the project to save it. But when he pulled the code and started poking around, it looked bad but not unsalvageable. The first thing he noticed is that, when following the instructions in the README, he couldn't build and run the application. Or maybe he wasn't following the instructions in the README, because the README was a confusing and incoherent mess, which included snippets from unresolved merges. Rudolf's first few days on the project were spent just getting it building and running locally, then updating the README. Once that was done, he started in on fixing the broken tests. There was a lot of work to be done, but it was all doable work. Rudolf could lay out a plan of how to get the project back on track and start delivering new features.
Daniel D. humblebrags that he can spell. "Ordering is easy, but alphabet is hard. Anyway for this developer it was. Can anyone spot which sorting algo they used?" Next he'll probably rub it in that he can actually read unlike the TDWTF staff. I guess we'll never know.