There's a language out there called "Progress Advanced Business Language" (or "Open Edge Advanced Business Language"). Just hearing that string of words in a sequence tells you you're in for it. It's a verbose, "English-like" programming language. But we're not here to pick on the language. A long t...

If you want to connect to another system, you need to supply credentials. That's a pretty obvious requirement. We can set aside the whole technical challenge of managing those credentials and the security problems various techniques create, and just focus in on: you must supply some credentials to a...

Daniel recently started a new job. His first task was to fetch some data from the database and render it to the user. Easy enough, and there were already wrapper functions around the database to make it easy. He called execute_read, passed it a query, and checked the results. There were no results. ...

This week, friend Adam R. sent in an entry and included with it a link to a short-form YouTube video. Presumably this was a mistake, because I watched that video and the next one and the next one and the next one and after two hours I still haven't got this column ready. I won't share the video link...

A horse can only be so tenderized, but as well established at this point: I don't like Hungarian Notation. Richard G sends us an example of yet more of it, being misused, as well as some bad date handling. That's basically two of the easiest things to complain about, so let's take a look! DateTime s...

Stella (previously) sends us a much elided snippet. The original code is several thousand lines contained in a single try block. But the WTF is pretty clear without seeing all of that: try: # the whole business logic without any exception handling except: print("Fudge") They didn't really say fudge ...

We should always be wary of "(.+)-driven development". Things like test-driven development, or domain-driven development are fine, but they're also frequently approached from a perspective of dogma, which creates its own terrible outcomes. But let's talk about domain-driven development. Without gett...

Today's anonymous submitter sends us a React view that presents some admin options. Of course, it should only show us those admin options if the user is authorized to do that. So let's see how they implemented it: {(isAdmin || canSeeResults) && ( <div> <p>Admin Actions</p> {(isAdmin || canSeeResults...

"Scammer offers to buy Google" is certainly a new twist on a very old New York con. Jan B. explains "Scammers have found a new way to steal money, scrap LinkedIn profiles and then send out emails with fake offers to buy people's companies. I'm guessing suddenly they need some fees paid just before t...

If there's one thing that seems to be a constant source of issues, it's people constructing SQL queries through string concatenation. Even if you're using parameters in the query, I'm opposed to handling raw SQL as strings in my programs. My solution is always "use a builder"- an API that constructs...

Frank suspected something odd when he spotted a use of React's useMemo function in some JavaScript code. Now, there's nothing wrong with using that method, in and of itself. It watches some variables and recalculates a callback if they change for any reason. It's a great tool for when you want to av...

Volodya sends us some bad date handling code in PHP. Which, I know, you're just reaching for the close tab and yawning when you hear that. You've seen it before. But bear with me, this one still has some fun bits to it. $monthes = array( 1 => 'Января', 2 => 'Февраля', 3 => 'Марта', 4 => 'Апреля', 5 ...

The real WTF is that our long-time friend and submitter Argle failed to dissuade all three of his sons from pursuing IT careers of their own: Back circa 2012, my three sons all got jobs at a company that had a brilliant web project. So brilliant that it had the support of a Disney VP, the mayor of t...

It's ironic -- this site gets absolutely inundated with blogspam from people trying to improve their SEO ranking, and yet the only requirement to get your website linked is one dumb little typo in the right menu. Faithful Michael R. is still job hunting, now even farther afield. "I shall try the gig...

Untodesu sends us this submission, with this comment: Literally no idea what kind of drugs the guy was taking but nonetheless we've rewritten it to be just a two-liner Well, that doesn't tell us a lot about what to expect from the code, but let's take a look. QStringList TableViewAssembly::parameter...

Are there any files to send? That's the question that Chris C's predecessor had. So they asked it. Again. And again. And again. Chris writes: I'm occasionally called upon to troubleshoot an ecommerce application that was built in the PHP 5.x days and has been running largely untroubled by maintenanc...

The waters are even more dangerous than we imagined. Have a look at some of the crazed whales our brave submitters and commenters have encountered in the wild. First comes an Anonymous tale of woe: Our company makes apps for businesses. We have 1 MAIN client whose CEO can make or break our company, ...

It's a holiday in the US today, so we're reaching back into the archives. What we really need is a single function that can do it all, and by "it" we mean "ruin your life." Original --Remy There are several types of bad code; there's lazy code, frantic code, unaware-of-a-better-way code, and aware-o...

"April is special," writes Elwin. It is, but take heart May, every month is special at TDWTF. "Admiral Ackbar is pinterested," punned The Beast in Black Manuel H. clocked something off on this website. "Noon seems to be very late in Lithuania, or maybe only in this hotel restaurant in Vilnius." 15H ...

Delilah works in a Python shop. Despite Python's "batteries included" design, that doesn't stop people from trying to make their own batteries from potatoes. For example, her co-worker wrote this function: def key_exists(element, key): if isinstance(element, dict): try: element = element[key] except...

A depressing quantity of software is what I would call a "data pump". I have some data over here, and I need it over there. Maybe I'm integrating into a legacy app. Or into an ERP. Or into a 3rd party API. At the end of the day, I have data in one place, and I want it in another place. Sally has a J...

JB has a database table that, at first glance, looks like one of those data warehouse tables that exists to make queries performant. You know the sort, the table that contains every date between 1979 and 2050, or every number out to 1,000,000 or something. It looks dumb, but it helps make certain jo...

Another representative line, and this one comes from an Excel spreadsheet. But, per Remy's Law of Requirements gathering ("No matter what the requirements doc says, what your users wanted was Excel"), this one was actually written by a developer. A developer who didn't understand how Excel works, bu...

"Winner ad placement!" snarked our Peter G. Errors on this website are always a shoo-in for the weekly column. An anonymous reader wrote "I got error 500 when I tried to submit an Error'd. Please make the file uploader check if the attached file is within the file upload limit, which I think is less...

Janči, a master's student of bioinformatics, was seated near the back of a large classroom. This was a simple compulsory elective course geared toward biologists. The professor was currently walking the class through their latest assignment. "We'll need to connect to some Linux servers," he announce...

Today's anonymous submitter sends us two blocks. The first is a perfectly normal line of React code: const [width, setWidth] = useState(false) This creates a width variable, defaulting it to false, and a setWidth function, which lets React detect when you change the variable, and trigger a re-render...

Frequent submitter Argle (previously), sends us a short little representative line. The good news is that this line of code came across Argle's screen during a code review: it was being removed. The bad news is that it was sitting in the code base for ages. _ = len / 8.0f; Argle writes: In a code re...

Today's anonymous submitter works for a large company. It's one of those sorts of companies which has piles, and piles, and piles of paperwork and bureaucracy. It also means that much of their portfolio of software is basic CRUD applications. "Here's a database for managing invoices." "Here's a data...

The single most common category of entries for this column is failed handling of NaN, null and undefined. Almost exclusively from javascript in web pages, sometimes in node servers, and almost never any other languages or frameworks. They're getting a bit repetitive but it's our solemn duty to call ...

Russell F (previously) sends us a small one today. It's not just a representative line, it's a representative comment. More than that, it's a true confession. Russell wrote some code, you see, and the logic was confusing. So, a co-worker added a comment to explain what the code was doing: 'This is *...