As previously discussed, C++ took a surprisingly long time to get a "starts with" function for strings. It took even longer to get a function called "contains". In part, that's simply because string::find solves that problem. Nancy sends us a… different approach to solving this problem. bool substri...

Today's anonymous submitter sends us some code that just makes your mind go… blank when you look at it. public static boolean isNull(String value) { return StringUtils.isBlank(value); } StringUtils.isBlank comes from the Apache Commons library. It's a helper function for Java which returns true if a...

If you've seen one developer recounting how their AI agent deleted production, you've seen them all. They're mostly not interesting stories. It's like watching someone speeding through traffic on a motorcycle without a helmet: the eventual tragedy is sad, but it's unsurprising and not an interesting...

Roger C. gets on second base with an unforced error. "Not only is the content too large, the error message informing us of this is also too large to fit the visible space. A layered, double WTF." "AWS Spellcheck Fail!" alerts Peter "If only someone at AWS knew the correct paramters to activate the s...

"This WTF is in Matlab" almost feels like cheating. At one place I worked, somebody's job was struggling through a mountain of Matlab code and porting it into C. "This Matlab code looks like it was written by an alien," also doesn't really get much traction- all Matlab code looks like it was written...

From our Anonymous submitter: Our company creates graphs to visualize data. We have many small fish customers, but we have one whale who uses our product that is 90% of company revenue. (WTF number 1.) So if he is not happy, it's all-hands-on deck-mode. He complained that our APIs and charts are loa...

A few years back, C# added the concept of "primary constructors". Instead of declaring the storage for class members and then initializing them in the constructor, you can annotate the class itself with the required fields, and C# automatically generates a constructor for you. It's all very TypeScri...

We rip on PHP a lot, but I am willing to admit that the language and ecosystem have evolved a lot. What started as an ugly templating language is now just an ugly regular language. But what happens when you still really want to do things with templates? Allison has inherited a Python-based, WSGI app...

"RFC 1738 (and 3986) disagree" and so does Daniel D. "Reddit API has some weird app creation going on with lots of recently migrated and undocumented stuff. But having redirect URL set to localhost (or 127.0.0.1) usually works. Well, if you don't disagree with Sir Tim Berners-Lee about what URL is. ...

Henrik H (previously) sends us a simple representative C# line: static void GenerateCommercilaInvoice() This is a static method which takes no parameters and returns nothing. Henrik didn't share the implementation, but this static function likely does something that involves side effects, maybe mani...

Today, we look at a representative comment, sent to us by Nona. This particular comment was in a pile of code delivered by an offshore team. // https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46744740/lodash-mongoose-object-id-difference/46745169 "Wait," you say, "what's the WTF about a comment pointing to a St...

Eric O worked for a medical device company. The medical device industry moves slowly, relative to other technical industries. Medical science and safety have their own cadence, and at a certain point, iterating faster doesn't matter much. Eric was working on a new feature on a system that had been i...

"Here, you're a programmer, take this over. It's business critical." That's what Felicity's boss told her when he pointed her to a network drive containing an Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet contained a pile of macros. The person who wrote it had left, and nobody knew how to make it work, b...

It's time again for a reader special, and once again it's all The Beast In Black (there must be a story to that nick, no?). "MySQL is not better than your SQL," he pontificated, "especially when it comes to the Workbench Migration Wizard" "Sadly," says he, "Not even gmail/chromium either." "Updated ...

Nona writes: "this is the beginning of a 2100 line function." That's bad. Nona didn't send us the entire JavaScript function, but sent us just the three early lines, which definitely raise concerns: if (res.length > 0) { await (function () { return new Promise((resolve, reject) => { We await a synch...

Candice (previously) has another WTF to share for us. We're going to start by just looking at one fragment of a class defined in this C++ code: TLAflaList. Every type and variable has a three-letter-acronym buried in its name. The specific meaning of most of the acronyms are mostly lost to time, so ...

Theresa works for a company that handles a fair bit of personally identifiable information that can be tied to health care data, so for them, security matters. They need to comply with security practices laid out by a variety of standards bodies and be able to demonstrate that compliance. There's a ...

Tim (previously) supports a relatively ancient C++ application. And that creates some interesting conundrums, as the way you wrote C++ in 2003 is not the way you would write it even a few years later. The standard matured quickly. Way back in 2003, it was still common to use C-style strings, instead...

"My thoughts exactly" muttered Jason H. "I was in a system that avoids check constraints and the developers never seemed to agree to a T/F or Y/N or 1/0 for indicator columns. All data in a column will use the same pattern but different columns in the same table will use different patterns so I'm no...

When looking at the source of a major news site, today's anonymous submitter sends us this very, very mild, but also very funny WTF: <div class="g-vhs g-videotape g-cinemagraph" id="g-video-178_article_slug-640w" data-type="videotape" data-asset="https://somesite.com/videos/file.mp4" data-cinemagrap...

The father of the "billion dollar mistake" left us last month. His pointer is finally null. Speaking of null handling, Randy says he was "spelunking" through his codebase and found this pair of functions, which handles null. public String getDataString() { if (dataString == null) { return Constants....

Tim H inherited some code which has objects that have many, many properties properties on them. Which is bad. That clearly has no cohesion. But it's okay, there's a validator function which confirms that object is properly populated. The conditions and body of the conditionals have been removed, so ...

Today's anonymous submission is one of the entries where I look at it and go, "Wait, that's totally wrong, that could have never worked." And then I realize, that's why it was submitted: it was absolutely broken code which got to production, somehow. Collection.updateOne(query, update, function(err,...

An anonymous cable-puller wrote "Reading a long specification manual. The words "shall" and "shall not" have specific meaning, and throughout the document are in bold italic. Looks like someone got a bit shall-ow with their search-and-replace skills."   Picki jeffphi attends to details. "Apparently ...

I feel like we've gotten a few SQL case statement abuses recently, but a properly bad one continues to tickle me. Ken C sends us one that, well: SELECT CASE h.DOCUMENTTYPE WHEN 2 THEN 3 WHEN 3 THEN 4 WHEN 4 THEN 5 WHEN 5 THEN 6 WHEN 6 THEN 7 WHEN 7 THEN 8 ELSE h.DOCUMENTTYPE END AS DocumentType, h.D...

You've already read the longer version. You need a quick phrase of corpo-speak to distract and confuse your rivals. Here's the generator for doing that: Generate class Replacement { constructor(text) { this.tokens = text.split(" "); } } class Rule { constructor() { this.replacements = []; } addRepla...

As we all know, there are two basic kinds of scientific studies. The first is a ground-breaking paper that changes the way we view the world, and forces us to confront our presuppositions and biases about how we think the world works, and change our perspective. The other tells us what we already kn...

Sandra from InitAg (previously) works with Bjørn, and Bjørn has some ideas about how database schemas should be organized. First, users should never see an auto-incrementing ID. That means you need to use UUIDs. But UUIDs are large and expensive, so they should never be your primary key, use an auto...

Angela's team hired someone who was "good" at SQL. When this person started, the team had some regular jobs which ran in the mornings. The jobs were fairly time consuming, and did a lot of database IO. When their current database person left for another job, they hired someone who had a "good grasp"...

There is no particular theme this week, except that I have noticed many of these contributors are providing "customized" email addresses. This is a practice which I too have followed, to detect who is selling my email address to spammers. I would use a consistent login id for many web sites, and a d...