Eri has a mix of a "true confession" and a "wait, really?" today. The programming language Vala bills itself as a C# like language that compiles into something pretty close to C performance, designed specifically for writing code against Gnome and its associated libraries. One of the C#-isms in brin...

From our anonymous submitter: Having reached the end of the road at a company increasingly swallowed up companies further east which you'd never believe were still afloat, I found myself headhunted for certain specialty software skills. I was reaching the final few years of my expected working span,...

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’...

Astute readers noticed last week that this editor (that is to say, me) had his own error'd failure to remember what day it was. Thank you for pointing it out promptly, and then proceeding to send in a bunch of examples of other sites calendar failures. Misery loves company! Traveler's travails, from...

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,...

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 lo...

Today's representative comment ran out of room. int maxLen = getColumnSize(session, "audit", "text_value1") - 16; // Leave some room for No, it isn't continued on the next line and just got trimmed out, except perhaps by a careless merge. This is the entire comment. Clearly, written by David Chase, ...

All I can say in response to our anonymous submitter's story is, ALMOST?! With the World Cup being hosted in North America this year, I remembered this story that happened back in 2014. At the time I was working in Brazil, for a company that builds software systems for public services. And, with the...

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. I’m the onl...

Kevin sends us an exception handler from C++. Let's see if we can spot what's going wrong: catch (Exception::Deadlock) { retry; } When we catch a deadlock happening, we retry. That's not a keyword in C++, and looking at how it's used, it has to be some kind of macro, and I suspect that the macro is ...

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 product...

The opposite of meritocracy is kakistocracy: the worst and least-qualified are the ones who rise to the top. Get real familiar with that word, dear readers. I think you'll need it. If anyone can back me up on this, it's our submitter, Jared B: I am a teacher by profession, and worked for a year at a...

We have a couple from Foo (AKA Foo) today, include a special text copy-paste Foo shared "I know you usually post image WTFs here, but here's a text output from chromium: [...:ERROR:components/viz/service/display/display.cc:273] Frame latency is negative: -0.18 ms While this issue might be fixed by n...

Peter G. shared with us yet another ordering bungled example of. "Should really say "please engage in an Easter egg hunt to find your language"." "Google can't count" claimed Peter S.. It adds up. "Yet another proof that 0=1, this time from Google." "Thanks, Microsoft" groused Ivan "Ever since Micro...

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 perso...

Matlab is special. Scientists and researchers love it. Programmers hate it, and not just because it uses 1-based arrays. I've worked on a number of projects where the task was "take this Matlab code and convert it to C so we can run it on an embedded CPU". Somehow, in that process, I've avoided lear...

Today's submitter John F. was migrating data from a Microsoft platform to a Microsoft platform, using Microsoft tools. Absolutely nothing could go wrong, right? Right? A few years ago, I was working on a migration. We had sold part of our business, and so we had to extract a whole bunch of customer ...

Developing software can't simply be done with a text editor and a compiler. There are a variety of other tools we have to bring to bear that support our efforts and keep the team organized, like say, source control. There are certain tools we all have to use that I would argue, nobody has actually m...

"So many zeroes! I'm in." W00H000! Kivi S. "found this ad in the wild. This must be a very large jackpot, look at all those zeroes!" "I knew it!" groused an anonymous cynic. "Yes, SignUpGenius. We all know that SUCCESS is just an illusion." Another anonymous grouch reported "I guess JustWatch has su...

Maciej works as a freelancer, and that frequently means picking up old PHP code that nobody wants to support. One project had been lingering for ages with key features missing. Specifically, it was supposed to make HTTP requests to other services on an interval, and use that to populate its data. "T...

"You submitted a pull request." Indika was, in fact, reviewing the comments she'd gotten on that very same pull request, when her boss, Bill, walked up behind her. What she didn't understand is why Bill said it like it was an accusation. "Yes?" she replied. "Okay, well, we don't do that here. You're...

Eric O was trawling through an API for handling concurrency, and found this little mismatch between the comment and the definition: /// <summary> /// private Status, because while this object needs to be able to set the status, consumers should only be able to check it, lest everything break. /// </...

I moved some things around on my calendar. 4:00 PM today is open. Please come to the executive floor. -Leila For a while I was stunned, staring at the email in front of me. I’d just told my boss I was quitting, refusing a promotion into my recently-deceased mentor Aggie’s shoes. Now, the new head of...

Looked to the past for some time-traveling entries to round out a themed post. They're 25% fresh. Robert apparently got a notification of a planned past delivery. It could be just a case of two systems that don't report different time zones, but even so, that's a wtf. Says he: "I just received an em...

Greta (previously) sends us more updates from her "Ancient Development Environment". An important task an IDE must do is report build errors to its users. Arguably, that's one of the most important parts. I wouldn't know, I insist on building from the CLI all the time, because IDEs confuse and frigh...

Frederick A sends us a bit of null checking code, and offers us a better solution. class ConferenceService { /// <summary> /// Checks if conference is active /// </summary> public bool IsCalling() { try { return m_ConnectionService.Core.State.IsWebRTCConnected; } catch { return false; } } } This is ...

Frequent submitter Capybara James sends us this simple snippet, which highlights that even when you have the lovely convenience of Optional types, you can use them wrong. if (StringUtils.hasLength(dto.getAssetModelUUID()) // Other conditions ) { return Optional.ofNullable(dto); } We access the getAs...

Flat-file style databases were designed to fit the constraints of the systems they were running on. You specify your schema in terms of "how many characters in a file we use to store this data", meaning something like this: JOHN SMITH 12343rd StAnytown PA12345 is read in my knowing that the first na...

I've never been a huge fan of their furniture but I will happily demolish a plate of meatballs. Jan agrees "My loyalty to this Swedish megastore is immeasurable." "Choosing Concert Seats is Surprisingly Hard" for jeffphi who explains "While I have mixed feelings about indulging in nostalgia tours, I...

Killian Brendel was looking through the .NET source code, and found this comment on the TimeSpan struct. // TimeSpan represents a duration of time. A TimeSpan can be negative // or positive. // // TimeSpan is internally represented as a number of milliseconds. While // this maps well into units of t...