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Schildt?

Ahaha, you made a funny!

Oh wait, shit, you wern't actually serious were you? Oh christ. Do you see any of your code on this website, by any chance?

You noticed "This is a spoof article" part, but not the "Please compare it with the original and you will see how little it has been changed" part.

It's a spoof, but it's not intended to be ignored completely. Nielsen just says, basically, "AJAX is like Frames were a few years back".

The article thus has a very good point. People went all crazy about frames, which broke a lot of stuff. Now, it's understood why and when frames are broken, and smart designers only use them in the places they make sense and work. And nowadays, people throw AJAX at everything and it just bloody well doesn't work right - but give it a few years, and AJAX has been pushed right where it belongs: places where asynchronous processing makes sense, without breaking the Javascript-less stuff. AJAX makes sense in Google Suggest, but not in every entyeerprice application.

I think you mean, "Brillant!" And that was Java.

I think you just answered your own question - datamining for The Daily WTF...

guide here

Don't touch that, it's the web server! (It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the post actually)

Get your daily dose of unmaintainable code straight from the guys who were just tasked to maintain it! Alex Papadimoulis provides it at http://www.thedailywtf.com/. There hasn't been a week yet where I've not said "WTF?" looking at the incredible production code snippets (or screenshots) that despaired programmers around the world send to him.

The best one, so far:

enum Bool
{
        True,
        False,
        FileNotFound
};

If you need a daily reminder of "what not to do", I highly suggest bookmarking TheDailyWTF.com.

Make them read The Daily WTF regularly, lest they end up on there.

Oh, and like eveyone else says: get them to read "Code Complete".

Even for a novice programmer, code like if(x == 456) is self-explanatory, no comments are needed.

You're right - how could it be possible not to know what that code is doing? (The rule is, the only magic numbers allowed are -1, 0, and 1. 456 is right out.)

But then again, don't worry, everything should be clear, right? :)

Many programmers only write code and don't actually read code written by others. I've found that looking at someone's code reflects their personality. For example sloppy error handling == over confident.

To see the "best" of the worst code and to learn from mistakes by others see:

which competent person would hire someone as a programer, and a high salary, without any experience?

My god !
I'll bet this guy won't like it !
Tinfoil Hat Program

I guess you never heard of FileNotFoundian Logic then?

Have you considered submitting the entire thing to The Daily WTF?

I'm glad you have an imagination, because unfortunately Knuth probably isn't. The Daily WTF could be, however it might be a while before they get around to you.

I'm glad you have an imagination, because unfortunately Knuth probably isn't. The Daily WTF could be, however it might be a while before they get around to you.

I'm a database designer and have had similar experiences... and my skin crawls just reading your post.

OK, so how about some examples? At least one, in the spirit of the Daily WTF :-)

Couldn't agree more. I'm a somewhat amateur C/C++ programmer, and I love using MSVC++ 6.0. The syntax highlighting, auto-indent, and file management are really the only features I use. I can code without them. I wrote (poor) PHP using Notepad for about a year, then found EditPad Pro, which does little more than syntax highlighting and auto-indenting (still use it for simple tasks like PHP and HTML editing), and have in the past year moved to MSVC++ for actual programming. I'm currently making a homebrew game for the PSP in C, but still use MSVC++ for the features I mentioned earlier.

I don't think that your IDE should affect how well-written the code you write is. If you write poor code, you're a bad programmer, regardless of your IDE. And if you're learning how to program using the IDE's auto-generated code... I look forward to seeing you on The Daily WTF soon.

maybe bcgi should scour here to find something not 'obvious'. ;-)

What would be wrong with charging by the rate of data flow? meter the bandwidth the calls use and charge that way? Is there a lawyer in the house? (shudders hearing myself asking that question) Could that be a way around the per minute stranglehold? Or does someone already have a patent on that while waiting to sic thier lawyers on infringers?

If you spend a lot of time coding in Java, take a look at any of the popular blogs at jroller.com.

Take a look at the blog aggragation of all the speakers from the No Fluff Just Stuff coference series (www.nofluffjuststuff.com) - disclaimer: I'm one of those speakers.

If you read Dave and Andy, you will also want to read Mike Clark:
http://www.clarkware.com/cgi/blosxom/index.rss

Martin Fowler's Blog:
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/bliki.rss

The Daily WTF has some great examples of horrible code:
http://thedailywtf.com/rss.aspx

Johanna Rothman has a good blog on software management:
http://www.jrothman.com/weblog/RSS/mpdblogger_rss. xml

as does David Anderson:
http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Weblog/Why EstimatesareMuda.html

All I know about it is that consultants contribute a lot of code to the Daily WTF

When I was 12, I was about as good of a programmer as I was a piano player or a painter. But since I spent a lot of time coding, guess what, I'm a pretty damn good coder and a shitty piano player. That doesn't mean I couldn't have been a good piano player, just that it takes years to get good.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. There is such thing as talent and natural ability. I took piano lessons for years but never "got it" and could never do more than memorize sequences of notes. I have friends who never took a lesson in their life but they "get" how music works and can hear a new song, walk over to a piano (or any other instrument), and play the song they just heard note-perfect.

Same with artists. I took some drawing classes in college and developed a small talent into a slightly-less-small talent. Then I went to work at a publisher and a designer friend showed me illustrations he did when he was 12 that was better than what I could do at 22. There are countless other examples.

OTOH, this same guy never "got" how to copy files from one floppy to another--the idea of "insert one floppy, copy its files to the desktop, insert the other floppy, copy the files from desktop to floppy, delete the temp files" never stuck.

OK, so maybe it's not which half of the brain you use, but there definitely is such thing as natural ability. The only problem here is that people think coding != creativity. Coding (or, more properly, programming) == problem solving, which takes a huge amount of creativity. Just because what programmers produce isn't aesthetically pleasing doesn't mean there's no creativity involved.

At the same time, all creativity is not equal. I'd be willing to bet that you could spend 5 years taking piano lessons or painting lessons and still be a pretty shitty player or painter. (no offense.) And that's the point the parent is making. Just because you're good at one thing does not make you good at another. You mentioned hackaday.com? Check out http://thedailywtf.com/.

Lots of people can have skills in more than one area. I like to think I'm a pretty decent coder and designer (though I accept I'm not as good as a specialist at either) and the best DBA I ever knew was also a great sax player. And don't come around with the tired argument that music == math, because it doesn't. Just because an octave higher = a string of half-length doesn't mean that music is inherently easy to understand for those who are good at math. I'm pretty good at math and pretty sucky at music, as were most of the other guys in my degree program.

The grandparent needs to spend more time with http://thedailywtf.com/. I almost never see perl code, but I see bizarre coding every day.

You acknowledge that some GCs do not collect at shutdown. But you also claim that GCs accomplish nothing useful except terminal reclamation.

No, I claimed that the only class of programmer error they fixed was failure to release memory before the program terminated. That doesn't necessarily mean at termination; in a system that relies on GC, it may be necessary to collect earlier in order to release memory for other uses.

However, GC-based systems are notorious for being memory hogs, because the requirements of other processes running concurrently may or may not be taken into account when deciding when to do this. They're also notorious for causing awkward delays, if the GC kicks in and does a whole load of housekeeping at an inopportune moment. These issues can make them a liability for either memory in a timely fashion or for managing other resource types at all, which rather constrains the classes of programmer errors they can possibly help to address.

And since programmers are rather loathe to do work for no reason (that would be absurd), it is much more likely that your earlier claim was simply wrong.

No, it would be a waste of time. It should be absurd in an ideal world, but since this kind of muppetry happens every day and there are even whole web sites devoted to programmers doing such daft things, apparently it isn't.

It can be really hard to explain something that's already been made self-evident, but I'll try. [...] Your claims have been unfounded, supported by nothing more than your personal authoritativeness.

For someone who obviously likes to argue logical fallacies, you're pretty much trying nothing but proof by intimidation. Go ahead, knock yourself out, but please don't imagine you're convincing anyone at this end.

Do you ever get the feeling that Vista is being written by the The Brillant Paula Bean?

Although, without bad programmers, we wouldn't have The Daily WTF.

Sometimes a person's purpose in life is to serve as an example to others. What kind of example is another matter entirely...

The Daily WTF is an excellent site that catalogs how NOT to write code and comments.

Damn you and your efficient code.
Look on this piece of code, from The Daily WTF.

Damn you and your efficient code.
Look on this piece of code, from The Daily WTF.

Your code is truly WTF worthy.

Do all the bad coders meet someplace and decide to prove how crappy they are by posting to Slashdot or something?

because whoever made the page didn't know what in the hell they were doing.

You're ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. Check out this daily WTF:

The great pyramids of DIV

Warning: Don't scroll too fast. Might cause motion sickness.

Ok, so it's not something you are looking forward to winning, or ever knowing you 'won' for that matter.

We have all made our WTFs but the entries here are real winners :)

(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!)

Justin.

if you all think comments are bad... how about output?

I didn't read anything in the reports of Jobs's remarks that suggested he was claiming more than to have been sensitised to wider design issues by his calligraphy classes and being in a position, chief head kicker for the Mac development project, where he could force a brake through the conceptual bottlenecks which had long separated end user computing and elegance. (emphasis mine)

But while we're talking about "conceptual bottlenecks" to "elegance": power-of-position is clearly not the effective ingredient, or we might have seen more elegance displayed by the dark side. Jobs famously claimed Micro$oft lacks taste*. It is true that Jobs always displayed taste and even humanism (from a distance!) while amassing his billions; conversely Gates' cheap avarice and common-thug mentality were only sharpened. I see from Google that the comparison has been made many times.

the high cost of retooling developers' brains

generation after generation insisting such a revolution was also inevitable

needed Gore's political initiative to break through the final barriers to the commercial Web

----------

*In the same interview, Jobs refers to proportional fonts: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have ... absolutely no taste, ... In the sense that they ... don't bring much culture into their product ... - well you know proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea - if it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products..." which is essentially the same claim he made at Stanford, but without saying "and the Mac wouldn't have had them if not for my calligraphy class".

If you visit http://www.thedailywtf.com/ you'll find that the monkey to programmer ratio is easily a million to one these days.

I'm not sure I trust the benchmarks. They proudly show their benchmarking code which has a blatant mistake in it. They spotted it, but wrongfilly blamed VB.NET and threads for it and then proudly announced they had to write a super-duper workaround for it to make it work.

Worthy of a WTF.

If you'd like to see it for yourself: look here

I suggest you apply for this job:
http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/34190/ShowPost.a spx

This never looks good to customers and is bad advertising in large traffic areas.

Except that the vast majority of the M$-using public, in some variant of Stockholm Syndrome, have come to expect such failure as normal and everyday. It just works, indeed. M$ marketing department putting the Big Lie principle to work.

The cost of habituating society to mediocrity on such a scale is incalculable... The irony is that the jets that fly in and out of the airports are built to an entirely different engineering standard, and the computing industry in general had better wake up before it's too late.

On the other hand, maybe I would be happier if I just had the same low expectations.

Dude, if you have some screenshots or files left over from that place, you should send some choice bits over to here for proper... umm... evaluation.

Actually, you should submit all unintentionally horrible code to The Daily WTF instead. Great site.:)

If you haven't been there yet, you should check out TheDailyWTF... it's not obfuscated code, but rather unmaintainable code people submit to show what they've been left to deal with at work. Quite interesting, and sometimes as difficult to understand as intentionally obfuscated code.

$result = mysql_query("SELECT a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l,
m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z, a2, b2, c2, d2, e2, f2, g2,
h2, i2, j2, k2, l2, m2, n2, o2, p2, q2, r2, s2, t2, u2, v2, w2, x2, y2, z2,
a3, b3, c3, d3, e3, f3, g3, h3, i3, j3, k3, l3, m3, n3, o3, p3, q3, r3, s3,
t3, u3, v3, w3, x3, y3, z3, a4, b4, c4, d4, e4, f4, g4, h4, i4, j4, k4, l4,
m4, n4, o4, p4, q4, r4, s4, t4, u4, v4, w4, x4, y4, z4, a5, b5, c5, d5, e5,
f5, g5, h5, i5, j5, k5, l5, m5, n5, o5, p5, q5, r5, s5, t5, u5, v5, w5, x5, y5, z5,
a6, b6, c6, d6, e6, f6, g6, h6, i6, j6, k6, l6, m6, n6, o6, p6, q6, r6, s6, t6, u6, v6, w6, x6, y6, z6,
a7, b7, c7, d7, e7, f7, g7, h7, i7, j7, k7, l7, m7, n7, o7, p7, q7, r7, s7, t7, u7, v7, w7, x7, y7, z7,
a8, b8, c8, d8, e8, f8, g8, h8, i8, j8, k8, l8, m8, n8, o8, p8, q8, r8, s8, t8, u8, v8, w8, x8, y8, z8,
a9, b9, c9, d9, e9, f9, g9, h9, i9, j9, j9, casenum, contype
FROM gct WHERE casenum = '$aid'");
while(list($a,$b,$c,$d,$e,$f,$g,$h,$i,$j,$k,$l,
$m,$n,$o,$p,$q,$r,$s,$t,$u,$v,$w,$x,$y,$z,$a2,$b2, $c2,$d2,$e2,$f2,$g2,
$h2,$i2,$j2,$k2,$l2,$m2,$n2,$o2,$p2,$q2,$r2,$s2,$t 2,$u2,$v2,$w2,$x2,$y2,$z2,
$a3,$b3,$c3,$d3,$e3,$f3,$g3,$h3,$i3,$j3,$k3,$l3,$m 3,$n3,$o3,$p3,$q3,$r3,$s3,
$t3,$u3,$v3,$w3,$x3,$y3,$z3,$a4,$b4,$c4,$d4,$e4,$f 4,$g4,$h4,$i4,$j4,$k4,$l4,
$m4,$n4,$o4,$p4,$q4,$r4,$s4,$t4,$u4,$v4,$w4,$x4,$y 4,$z4,$a5,$b5,$c5,$d5,$e5,
$f5,$g5,$h5,$i5,$j5,$k5,$l5,$m5,$n5,$o5,$p5,$q5,$r 5,$s5,$t5,$u5,$v5,$w5,$x5,
$y5,$z5,$a6,$b6,$c6,$d6,$e6,$f6,$g6,$h6,$i6,$j6,$k 6,$l6,$m6,$n6,$o6,$p6,$q6,
$r6,$s6,$t6,$u6,$v6,$w6,$x6,$y6,$z6,$a7,$b7,$c7,$d 7,$e7,$f7,$g7,$h7,$i7,$j7,
$k7,$l7,$m7,$n7,$o7,$p7,$q7,$r7,$s7,$t7,$u7,$v7,$w 7,$x7,$y7,$z7,$a8,$b8,$c8,
$d8,$e8,$f8,$g8,$h8,$i8,$j8,$k8,$l8,$m8,$n8,$o8,$p 8,$q8,$r8,$s8,$t8,$u8,$v8,
$w8,$x8,$y8,$z8,$a9,$b9,$c9,$d9,$e9,$f9,$g9,$h9,$i 9,$j9,$j9,$casenum,$contype) = mysql_fetch_row($result))

From The Daily WTF:

I want a website directory, like a yellow pages, or Yahoo. I want any web user to be able to add a link, under the relevant categories available, like...finance,real estate,travel,games etc. I would like the links to be approved before they appear. I want the search results displayed in the following fashion: A URL text, or URL image, with a little description underneath. I want the following tools - top 50 searches, most popular links, a search facility. A space across the top of the page to insert my own logo.

To Wit:

char *conf_file = "btail.conf";

if (argc > 2)
{
fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s [configurationfile]\n", argv[0]);
return 1;
}
else if (argc == 2)
{
conf_file = argv[1];
}
conf *config = load_config(conf_file);

That aside, your code would be easier to read (slashcode's broken formatting nonwithstanding) if you used a switch construct.

// If the user doesn't want to specify a config, we'll use the default
switch( argc ) {
case 1:
confg_file = "btail.conf";
break;
case 2:
conf_file = argv[1];
break;
default:
fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s [configurationfile (defaults to btail.conf)]\n", argv[0]);
return 1;
}

Amusing proof of writing nightmare code in any language

People seem to have it out for Javascript at Slashdot. Heh. A lot of negativity towards the language. I've seen some beautiful javascript, but I guess I'm one of the few.

http://thedailywtf.com . The site is god damn hilarious.

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