Slashdot Mirror

I predict a huge number of The Daily WTF posts about poorly written, slow, "designed" by someone who really didn't get the problem domain, in about 6-12 months.

I was aware that I was comparing apples and oranges but the juxtaposition of two similar thoughts in apparent discord was amusing. Particularly if you assume sexist guy that "can't" tell the difference between two women.

You did the right thing, the guys worried about your gender weren't worried about doing their jobs or you doing yours, this means an office full of the daily WTF and some light sexual harassment to go with it.

Was certain I had read those comments before. Yep

I trade coal futures all the damn time and I've never seen a single barge of coal.

Keep your fingers crossed that no software bug will give you this sight in the morning: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Special-Delivery.aspx

That's what I was thinking too, if the simplest solution is to just get a bigger disk, then let's just do that. Doing otherwise is like a company rationing office supplies. Personally I just bought 2x4TB drives that'll give me 5TB more HDD space (I'm retiring two 1.5TB drives) because I'm too lazy to sort through it all. Hell, I can't even keep my downloading in pace with technology, at one point I had ten HDDs operational now I'm down to six and if I wasn't looking for room to expand I could go down to four. I don't think of limiting my HDD use any more than I limit drinking from the tap.

but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.

[Citation needed]

Here.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Immaculate_Backup_.aspx
:)

My company has a timestamp class that contains 2000 lines of code.

And 150 methods, some of which are duplicates, but just misspelled.

Headed over to The Daily WTF right now. :(

Ok, NOW I know how this could happen: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Stargate-Code-of-the-Replicators.aspx. Looks like JavaScript is the future.

Here's just the latest in an ongoing series of horror stories about long-winded method/function names on The Daily WTF:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Self-Documenting.aspx

Whenever I hear the name "VistA" I shudder inwardly. Why? Because it's written in MUMPS. I mean, FFS, this is a language that has had two articles all to itself on DailyWTF.

For my sins, I had to do some work on a system written in MUMPS. I guess it's a rite of passage that you just have to endure in the healthcare IT world if you want to graduate to the more wizardly ranks. I had to deal with it for a mere two days. I never want to see another line of MUMPS code again.

Whenever I hear the name "VistA" I shudder inwardly. Why? Because it's written in MUMPS. I mean, FFS, this is a language that has had two articles all to itself on DailyWTF.

For my sins, I had to do some work on a system written in MUMPS. I guess it's a rite of passage that you just have to endure in the healthcare IT world if you want to graduate to the more wizardly ranks. I had to deal with it for a mere two days. I never want to see another line of MUMPS code again.

Well that was a link fail on my part. I had intended to post this:

Nuff said.

No, that was a link fail followed by a proofreading fail followed by a preview-button fail.

That's a lot of fail for such a short post!

Well that was a link fail on my part. I had intended to post this:

Nuff said.

for these poor little guys.

That's 'Brillant'.

As in:
Twas brillant, and the slithy code
did gyrate and jingle in the cloud.
All mimsy were the managers,
And the dumb fools outgrave.

Beware the Idiot, my son!
The jaws that flap, the claws that snatch!
Beware the Flubflub bird, and shun
the frumious repo fetch!

I had a semi-junior developer from India that was overall a good coder but did some really bad things at times. As his team lead, I tried the direct approach but he just argued to my face that he was right and had been doing it that way all along and that it was no big deal.

Instead of continuing to argue with him, I just showed him The Daily WTF and laughed with him about how stupid some of these coders were. I told him that I read it every day to laugh at bad coders, as a form of therapy. After about a year, his coding had improved dramatically.

The correct spelling is "brillant".

The list of things that Windows will happily try to execute when typing in commands is downright scary.

Also: here's a nickel, kid.

Obligatory website: http://thedailywtf.com/

Because if I push *that* button, you lose $10 million.

Probably it's The Automated Curse Generator.

Should be a CS job, really. All you need to do is modify the speed-up loop.

"But my funding depends on my numbers being run!"

Thread.sleep()

Reminds me of one of my favorite stories: The Speed-up Loop.

Thing is, it was a small, young company still figuring out what the best practices were to follow. When I had started there, things were extremely ad-hoc: there was pretty much no process at all (not too dissimilar from this, actually!), and I knew pretty much nothing when I started. Towards the end of my stay, I had pretty much taught myself concepts such as proper source control, process models and that kind of thing, and was trying to get things implemented (despite resistance from the "greybeards"). At the time when all this was going on, things were moving in the right direction, but the whole system was still far from perfect. It's likely been sorted out since.

Like I said, sometimes it's necessary to learn the hard way.

Why would you have to retest "everything" if youre only modifying the permadeath function?

That depends. Do you want your company featured on TheDailyWTF.com or not? It's full of stories about PMs and business owners who insist that changes be made without adequate testing, and none of them end well.

When you start working with big projects, large teams, and looming deadlines, you realize that nothing is ever that simple.

If you spend an afternoon writing a program that makes the screen flash and types "Hello, World!" over and over again until someone kills it, then yes all you need to do is comment out a line or two and everything will work perfectly.

When you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, interdependent modules and inheritance diagrams that resemble buckyballs, all written by dozens of people over several years time, things get complicated.

If you honestly think that you can make changes to a product without needing to test them then you may have a future in high-frequency trading, but I advise you to be a little more careful in truly competitive markets like gaming.

That's probably "don't want to". Considering they "made Google's speech recognition for U.S. English 25 percent better, and are set to be used in other products, such as image search", they're probably aiming for general solution, not specific ones.

Ability to repurpose it like this is pretty nice, I think. No quack.

Have you seen the IOCCC code that looks like an airplane? It's a flight sim. Have you seen the DeCSS Gallery? Also, there's lots of code on the Daily WTF that is as creative as it is terrible.

How about CSS? Am I not coding or not designing when I write that?

And spend a week or two reading http://thedailywtf.com/

If you really think anyone can do the job I recommend you peruse this site some.

Wow. I think the follow up comments are more telling than the original post. I couldn't believe that so many people would not understand a singleton!

Whoosh

If you really think anyone can do the job I recommend you peruse this site some.

Wow. I think the follow up comments are more telling than the original post. I couldn't believe that so many people would not understand a singleton!

There you have it. You think being able to program makes you special in some way or indicates that you're above average.

Think of everyone you knew from high school. Now imagine each one of them piloting an airplane you are a passenger in. Not everyone is cut out for every job. Some jobs do require the right person to do the job correctly.

And if you think any idiot can write code you clearly haven't ever been given the task of maintaining some other idiot's code base before. If you really think anyone can do the job I recommend you peruse this site some.

Unlike brain surgery, you can be self taught and be good at programming. But just like brain surgery not everyone should be doing it.

I fail to believe the the content of The DailyWTF is sourced entirely from self-taught programmers. From experience, morons will be morons whether or not they have a CS degree.

"Worlds most F'd up interviews" would make an entertaining /. discussion.

The Daily WTF has a nice collection of interview stories.

I've been at companies that do all day interviews and those are pointless.

Yep, if the interview process is that frustrating, imagine how bad it would be to actually work there. Of course, you can always just walk out.

Thus demonstrating my long-time assertion (ever since my stint in the video game biz) that video game developers are crap programmers. No common routines to manipulate a heavily-used data structure? Not even a set of macros? This kind of story belongs over on The Daily WTF.

But herein lies the problem: anonymous and software development are not comparable, not unless you want to stretch the definition of problem statement. But that's just Reductio ad Absurdum just to fit an argument.

Anonymous could be reduced to an algorithm and so can software. Another aspect they have in common is both usually depend on continuous optimization.

Which problem of decision making are we referring to here?

Just gathering a mass of emotional people does not produce good decisions without direction. Not all programmers make good design decisions and if you look at open source software you'll see a lot of great software ideas designed horribly. Napster was an example of a great idea with a horrible design.

How does this draw lessons for software development, and to general projects and missions with identifiable players? Is it a legitimate argument that requires Anonymous as an example (which is what the article says, remember the topic)?

I think it's more Anonymous can learn something from the software development process. Anonymous is like a piece of "software"that offers conceptual and philosophical cover as an umbrella organization. The problem is that concept and philosophy are receiving the least attention while the most attention is being put into the hacktivist aspect which may actually be the least important function of Anonymous as a concept.

Separations of duties are subject (for good or bad) to managerial control (or lack thereof, there is such a thing as bad managerial control by omission). Considering that the premise of the original article intends to draw lessons from Anonymous in the context of excessive control, then that puts micro-management as the main focus of the discussion.

Micro-management is just bad management. Separation of duties can be a part of good management practices.

And that typically ends horribly in the form of architect astronauts building crystal citadels. I've seen in the enterprise and in the defense sector. The moment you separate design from hand-to-hand development, you are typically doomed. Development gives immediate feedback about the consequences of architectural/design decisions.

I'm not saying it has to be separate to the point of the designers not being able to read or understand the code. The designers should understand the code. Designers should review the code continuously. Designers don't have to actually do the coding because a lot of coding isn't much more than implementing the design typing stuff in and testing it for bugs. The hardest part of software development is the design process and that is the part which requires abstract thinking while the coding part just requires following of orders, checking your work for bugs to make sure it works, all which could be part of a blueprint or set of instructions. Consider that most development teams want to produce a lot of code for cheap it's going to cost a bit more money to try and take junior coders and turn them into lead designers.

You, as a designer (or as part of a design team) can create design blue prints send to junior developers (local or offshore), but you need to be substantially involved in day-to-day development (in addition to conducting frequent code reviews to ensure your juniors/minions are implemented the design as intended.) The only time I've seen such partitioning working out is when the designers are involved in coding as well. It rarely works otherwise.

When did I say the designer shouldn't be involved? The designer has to keep track of everything to make sure it's all going according to the design or make changes to the design.

The problem with Anonymou

It is an off-site backup that can go away in a poof at any time.

And this just appeared in my news feed. Heh.

Based on your "solution" I believe you're the webmaster of this site.

People just never seem to wrap your head around the fact that you never use raw user input for anything that a parser will look at, at any point in time!

Here's probably the funniest discussion thread on injection attacks, ever.

So, can I trust YOUR link?

Here's probably the funniest discussion thread on injection attacks, ever.

That is indeed funny, in a most terrifying way!

when will people ever learn? And not just SQL injection attacks. I had to actually write a destructive exploit for a popen injection attack on a MMORPG before the rest of the dev team would believe me that it was a serious vulnerability (it had code that if you said a URL, people could click on it... except they were just passing what the user wrote to popen, tacked to the end of your browser-launch string). People just never seem to wrap your head around the fact that you never use raw user input for anything that a parser will look at, at any point in time!

Here's probably the funniest discussion thread on injection attacks, ever.

Most North American banks implement what is known as "Wish-it-Was Two Factor" authentication..

Which is nothing more than another password.

Second try of an old system... http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Cracking-your-Fingers.aspx

absolutely true, but if you look at TheDailyWTF you'll see that so-called 'professional' programmers can come up stuff that's just as bad. Only they think they're coding gods, at least the salesman with his VB app knows its just a quick n dirty piece of crap tooling that he uses to get his work done.

In my place, I know several VB programmers who happily say this, and they know that one day we'll rewrite their apps "properly" so they are less expensive to maintain and work better, when we have the time... which will probably be never.

I believe they were referencing this little gem from The DailyWTF:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_.aspx

Yes, it is a clbuttic mistake:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake-.aspx

(the comments are genius)

I'm not sure it's wholly accurate, but I use it as a starting point for discussing the topic.

I've found that the ability to talk to non-technical people is more important to most hiring managers simply because it's a lot easier to train someone to be technical than it is to train them to work with people.

I disagree with that.

I think it is easier for the hiring managers to evaluate "interpersonal skills" than it is for them to evaluate "technical skills". And since it is easier for them, they value those skills more.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

http://thedailywtf.com/