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There should be a communist programming language.
- There are no classes.
- There is no inheritance.
- All code is executed simultaneously, since it's equal.
- All variables are global, since everything belongs to everyone
- There are no private functions
- Every function must have side effects, for the 'greater good'
- As soon as it is written, you no longer own the code
- Instead the code owns you
- And your machine
I slowly get why this thing didn't work out on society either.9 -
DevOps is like development, except there is zero test coverage, everything is a race condition, and there are a million variables declared as global. 😡8
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A sidebar.
Literally just a sidebar.
And yes, this was in Hell.
Its code was spread across at least 40 files, and it used a bunch of freaking global variables to unfurl accordion sections, hide other sections/items, highlight the active item, etc. These were set (and unset!) in controller actions, so if you didn’t unset one, it remained open and highlighted until another action unset it.
Some of the global variable checks (and permissions checks) were done in the individual views, some outside of the `render` statements that include them. Some of them inherited variables from the parent, some from the controller, some from globals. Getting a view to work was trial and error. Oh, and some had their own inline css, some used css classes.
Subsections were separate views, so were some individual items, both sometimes rendered using shared templates, and all of the views and templates had the exact. same. filename. (They were located in different directories, and thus located automagically via implicit relative paths.) So, it was a virtually endless parade of`render partial => “sidebar”`. Which file does that point to? Good luck figuring it out!
Also, comments in several places said adding a new section required a database migration. I never did figure out why.
Anyway, I discovered this because I had an innocuous-sounding ticket to rearrange the sidebar, group some sections/items under different permissions, move some items to another menu, and nest some others differently.
It took me two bloody weeks, and this was when I was extremely productive every day.
Afterward, I was so disgusted by it that I took a day and removed every trace of the sidebar I could find, and rewrote it. I defined the sidebar in a hash, and wrote a simple recursive builder to generate the markup. It supported optional icons, n-level nesting, automatic highlighting of the current item and all parent nodes, compound and inherited permissions, wrapping of long names, hover and unfurl animations, etc. Took me a couple hundred lines of Ruby at the most, plus about the same of css.
Felt so good to remove that blight.5 -
So this bunch of idiots made this huge iOS app using lots of global variables, lots of spaghetti code and basically no separation between logic and UI.
Another bunch of idiots were told to take that iOS app and basically port it to Android. And they ported that same code mess, almost line by line, and adding some weird shit.
Now the HQ of the first bunch of idiots realize that the second bunch of idiots were too slow/inefficient/whatever, and they're now asking US to solve that Android mess and add another shitload of features.
The worst part of it, is that both bunches of idiots are still working on it, so we're basically forced to follow the same shitty style until the first deadline, otherwise we'd die suffocated by stinky merge conflicts. Which will happen anyway because our changes are going to overlap.
Oh, and the PM refuses to understand the disaster coming and there's six hours of time zone difference.
Fuck this shit.7 -
For years I've had this friend, since high school, and now we are 21. Our paths had always been different, i decided to go to a technical high school that provides more specialized education (around IT in this case) and he went to a normal high school that provides a more wide range of knowledge and barely anything related to what we both wanted to study. Different tastes for different people huh? Well sure but during that time he was being snobbish towards me because normal high schools are considered more prestigious, or rather, technical high schools are infamous for attracting lazy students or students that don't wanna move up to a university.
We fought a few times over this, sometimes even stopped talking for long periods of time but we always got back together. A few years later, after our university entry exams I joined what roughly translates to technical university, its just more focused on practical IT stuff with a lot of lab courses every semester. He joined a more academically inclined one that is half economics and half IT (applied informatics). And now he has another thing to be snobbish about since the relation between the 2 unis is similar to that between the high schools but I don't care anymore, I don't feel like im missing out on anything with my choices.
3 days ago he called me on discord to check his python script and why it wasn't working. Good Odin that piece of code was worse that anything I've seen. Littered with global variables, inconsistent function and variable names, duplicate code, unused variables. I was honestly shocked and disappointed cos he always mentions different projects he is working on, an aspiring web developer.
I took those 300 hundred lines of atrocity and turned them into 80. But more importantly it was something that worked and did the damn job well. A thing of beauty.
I don't know if he was more surprised that i got it working or that it was so different from his initial "solution".
All of a sudden he is not so dismissive of me...
Fuck you for underestimating me and every choice I made to get here.
P.S. I kept his original code, always gives me a shit eating grin.12 -
Give me a 10 year old application with no comments, layers of spaghetti code, global variables, embedded SQL, and a text editor with no debugging; just don’t make me write Excel formulas.6
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The nightmare continues.
Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.
It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.
More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”
Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)
Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.
Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.
On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!
Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.
You can’t make this stuff up.7 -
Okay, story time.
Back during 2016, I decided to do a little experiment to test the viability of multithreading in a JavaScript server stack, and I'm not talking about the Node.js way of queuing I/O on background threads, or about WebWorkers that box and convert your arguments to JSON and back during a simple call across two JS contexts.
I'm talking about JavaScript code running concurrently on all cores. I'm talking about replacing the god-awful single-threaded event loop of ECMAScript – the biggest bottleneck in software history – with an honest-to-god, lock-free thread-pool scheduler that executes JS code in parallel, on all cores.
I'm talking about concurrent access to shared mutable state – a big, rightfully-hated mess when done badly – in JavaScript.
This rant is about the many mistakes I made at the time, specifically the biggest – but not the first – of which: publishing some preliminary results very early on.
Every time I showed my work to a JavaScript developer, I'd get negative feedback. Like, unjustified hatred and immediate denial, or outright rejection of the entire concept. Some were even adamantly trying to discourage me from this project.
So I posted a sarcastic question to the Software Engineering Stack Exchange, which was originally worded differently to reflect my frustration, but was later edited by mods to be more serious.
You can see the responses for yourself here: https://goo.gl/poHKpK
Most of the serious answers were along the lines of "multithreading is hard". The top voted response started with this statement: "1) Multithreading is extremely hard, and unfortunately the way you've presented this idea so far implies you're severely underestimating how hard it is."
While I'll admit that my presentation was initially lacking, I later made an entire page to explain the synchronisation mechanism in place, and you can read more about it here, if you're interested:
http://nexusjs.com/architecture/
But what really shocked me was that I had never understood the mindset that all the naysayers adopted until I read that response.
Because the bottom-line of that entire response is an argument: an argument against change.
The average JavaScript developer doesn't want a multithreaded server platform for JavaScript because it means a change of the status quo.
And this is exactly why I started this project. I wanted a highly performant JavaScript platform for servers that's more suitable for real-time applications like transcoding, video streaming, and machine learning.
Nexus does not and will not hold your hand. It will not repeat Node's mistakes and give you nice ways to shoot yourself in the foot later, like `process.on('uncaughtException', ...)` for a catch-all global error handling solution.
No, an uncaught exception will be dealt with like any other self-respecting language: by not ignoring the problem and pretending it doesn't exist. If you write bad code, your program will crash, and you can't rectify a bug in your code by ignoring its presence entirely and using duct tape to scrape something together.
Back on the topic of multithreading, though. Multithreading is known to be hard, that's true. But how do you deal with a difficult solution? You simplify it and break it down, not just disregard it completely; because multithreading has its great advantages, too.
Like, how about we talk performance?
How about distributed algorithms that don't waste 40% of their computing power on agent communication and pointless overhead (like the serialisation/deserialisation of messages across the execution boundary for every single call)?
How about vertical scaling without forking the entire address space (and thus multiplying your application's memory consumption by the number of cores you wish to use)?
How about utilising logical CPUs to the fullest extent, and allowing them to execute JavaScript? Something that isn't even possible with the current model implemented by Node?
Some will say that the performance gains aren't worth the risk. That the possibility of race conditions and deadlocks aren't worth it.
That's the point of cooperative multithreading. It is a way to smartly work around these issues.
If you use promises, they will execute in parallel, to the best of the scheduler's abilities, and if you chain them then they will run consecutively as planned according to their dependency graph.
If your code doesn't access global variables or shared closure variables, or your promises only deal with their provided inputs without side-effects, then no contention will *ever* occur.
If you only read and never modify globals, no contention will ever occur.
Are you seeing the same trend I'm seeing?
Good JavaScript programming practices miraculously coincide with the best practices of thread-safety.
When someone says we shouldn't use multithreading because it's hard, do you know what I like to say to that?
"To multithread, you need a pair."18 -
Not a rant about anything in particular. Just a summary of some feelings stored in the hateful part of my heart.
Developing for Android: Add this third-party library to your Gradle build. Use (this) built-in Android class to make the thing work.
*Clicks link
Deprecated since API version SUCKMYDICK-7. Use (this) instead
*Clicks link
Deprecated since API version LICKMYBALLS-32. Use...
Developing for Windows: Please use (this) API call. It was literally already available before Bill Gates was born. Carbon dating has placed this item to older than the universe itself and it is likely the entry point for the big bang. It is also still the best way to accomplish (task).
Developing for Linux: "Hmm, I wonder how to use this"
> > > Some shitty mailing list in small blue monospace font tells you to reference a man page that is three versions behind but the only version available.
What? Those three sentences didn't explain it enough? Well, maybe you aren't cut out for this type of thing.
JavaScript: you know how it is.
SQL: You expect a decent-quality answer from stack overflow but you always get an outdated and hacky response and it's using syntax from Microsoft SQL. You need MySQL.
C#: A surprising number of Microsoft forum results ranking high on Google. You click on one in hopes that it will be of any sort of quality. You quickly close the tab and wonder why you ever even had hope.
Literally any REST API: Is it "query" or "q"? "UserID" or "user_id"? Oh, fuck, where's the docs again?
You thought you escaped JavaScript, but it was a trick!: Some bullshit library you downloaded to make your other library work redefined one of the global variables in the project you inherited. Now you get 347 "<x> is not a function" errors in your console. Good luck, asshole.
FontAwesome/ Material fonts/ Any icon font pack: You search "Close" for a close button icon. No results. You search "Simplified railroad crossing sign without the railroad". You get a close icon.
I think that's all of my pent up rage. Each of them were too small for an individual rant so I had to do this essay.2 -
I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.
What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?
There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.
I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or
B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.
Impossible decision here.
If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.
But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.
So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.
Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.
Such fucking wonderful code.
I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.7 -
Refactoring code of somebody who left and:
- Plagued the code with TYPOS (milions of them but ok I can live with those... to a certain point)
- Used global variables by default.... of course even where they're not needed
- Used comments only in parts of code where... well they're not needed, important ones are of course left out
- Did not indent code. 3..2..1... Did not FUCKING indent code properly and when he did... did WRONG!
- Instead of indentation he used commented line with multiple ==== signes.... so far top is 60 consecutive lines with olny ==== again no apparent pattern here
- Did not follow a fucking standard in variable naming... no camle casing... there are varaibles assigned multiple times to "temp" variables without no reason just for the sake of wasting resources on the system I guess
This is just the beginning of the review but I already want to change job, die, scream, cry... not in any specific order.10 -
Global variables in JavaScript everywhere... Being accessed by every file, every function every class... Everywhere....5
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I told a guy to implement an algorithm in cpp. He wrote this weird 600+ lines of code which contains only global variables and void functions then I told him to make it object oriented and he just put all those garbage in the class and gave me back and on top of that class name is Template and file name is template.cpp. I don't have words to describe his code. May be this picture can help you understand my state. Oh, if you think this matchOn_r1, r2,r3 are different then you are mistaken they are just different with one argument (one global argument). This is just part of the code. He has this shit all over the place. Why the fuck this kind of people exists?
13 -
I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.
Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.
I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.
This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.
One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.
Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation
There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.
Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.
6 -
Your favourite comment?
My team was working on a legacy system, one part of it is an assistant, sadly required as global variables.
Being a non-english-first-language company, some dev years ago thought shortening said assistant to "ass" would be a wise idea - less to type, right?
When we redid the application 2016 part-by-part, our code needed to define 3-4 global variables starting with the "ass" prefix for the legacy parts to work. The colleague who was tasked with this is a fine gentleman from England.
Later as I read through the commit, I found 5 lines of code following 20 lines of comments explaining and deeply apologizing for "ass", "ass_open", etc.
The same dev also had a "HACK OF THE YEAR" comment he moved around when time constraints made a less-than-optimal fix necessary which was worse than the last "highscore".1 -
I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.
I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.
We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.
I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?
I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.13 -
Code fuckup day or what?! After two weeks where I wasn't on my project and a co-worker handled it, I came back to my project and reviewed what he had done so far.
Me: "I don't understand how this new code part here can work?"
Him: "Uhm, actually, it doesn't, somehow."
Me: "..."
Then he had checked in his stuff with spaces while the whole project is with tabs. And variables that were used in a different way, but still under the old name, now completely misleading. Bypassing existing infrastructure and defines with "just for this case" hacks. But the best was tracking higher level state by peeking into lower level data buffers, even pulling out their data definitions into global header files - instead of using proper states in the higher layer itself.
NOT! IN! MY! FUCKING! PROJECT!!!
So I spent the day cleaning up the shit to fight off software rot right in the beginning.4 -
Welcome to PLC development! Your first thing to do is find out whta these dozen global variables do that are used by several tasks in odd places.11
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Just spent an entire night eaning up my codebase...
I optimized some of the functions got rid of unnecessary global variables and changed up the whole file hirearchy so it would be easier to read. After spending all night doing this I went to run the program and for once it seemed everything worked right the first time! However a portion of my application that is supposed to happen at a certain date and time never would run. After spending all night comparing each and every line for what I changed versus my last commit I couldn't find the fallacy in my logic. Everything should still work like it did before. After spending more time looking for bugs I finally realized I didn't break anything when I switched over to this new structure it was the old code that was broken. I went through the old code and after some debugging eventually found the culprit an extra continue statement that prevented my loop from fully executing. Lesson learned sometimes the biggest bugs can spawn from one line of code.4 -
A project at work which is based on blindly copying other projects, empty catch clauses, a static class for global variables, and incompetence.1
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My coworker claimed to have experience with R programming on their resume.
Now I don't know R myself but I'm pretty sure what actually happened was they were handed an R program and told how to run it...
Cause they doesn't use functions without being told to, I've had to explain global vs local variables multiple fucking time, and the worst fucking offense in my opinion
THEY DOESN"T READ FUCKING ERROR MESSAGES, so many times there's been an issue in the scripts and when I go to look at what's wrong it's 3 fucking lines down from what they fucking screenshot and spam me on teams with5 -
My definition of hell?
Being forced to debug nested callbacks abusing global variables & closures generated from from reflection...6 -
My first task in my current company, a few years ago.
I had to add features to a 10 year old microcontroller-based device written in C.
There was a struct named "global", which held hundreds of other structs that held variables or even more structs.
If one would have printed the structure of this mess it would haven needed several pages.
This "global"-struct was used in every single sourcefile to store and pass data around. Obviously there was no documentation and often useless comments.
Additionally there were a few protocol stacks involved, mainly similar, only differing in one or two protocol layers.
The implementation of the protocol stack was by setting flags in the "global"-struct in every protocol layer and having the application data in a buffer.
The complete telegram with all layer specific data (header, checksums, etc.) was then build at one single point right before sending it, based on the flags and the data buffer.
As there was no chance to reuse protocol layers with this implemenation. Three protocol implementations with special telegram builder existed in parallel, although they were nearly identical.
I needed a fourth variant of the protocol stack, so I had no chance but to make another copy with some minor changes.
But there was a benefit from this task.
As I had to do the software for the successor of this device from scratch I learned for many things how not to do them :-) -
Programming contest assignments, first level:
1. "...if you don't know how to return values from a function, you can just print them"
2. "...if you don't know how to read files, you can assume data is in global variables"
3. Required recursion
4. "...and estimate its time complexity.", "You may pre-process the data, but use at most o(n^3)", "your algorithm must use under n^3 operations"
That escalated quickly!1 -
300 global variables.. THREE HUNDRED FUCKING GLOBAL VARIABLES?
Are you for real?
Now let me check the line numbers again..
hmm.. line 97 to .. yep line 410, just a few new lines to seperate some of them or.. group? Idk, I've given up on trying to understand those.
Now you may ask "But ThatPerlDeb, where did you see this and what was the intention?"
Low and behold, take a chair and I may explain this to you.
First of all: Fuck the dev that wrote this!
Second: Fuck all the devs that kept up with this practice or whatever you want to fucking call this!
Now, the application is our POS system that our customers can use for a monthly fee (That this piece of garbage even requires payment is disgusting) but anyway..
The global variables sometimes are declared for labels, sometimes for some frames, sometimes just for random values to be there.
We're using Perl for the POS system and Perl ain't the best at OOP, so in the dev's defense I can understand why you'd use a few global variables, but not fucking 300!! FUCK OFF WITH THIS BULLSHIT!!
So now I'm going through this torture slowly but surely deleting globals and putting them into some sort of scope and always MANUALLY test if something broke. Again, this company sucks ass and there's nothing that could even be considered a "unit test" or something like that, so fuck that, too.
After two hours I've brought down the count of global variables to about 260, so there's progress being made..
But then, there comes more!
"But how???" you may ask, and you're right, I've asked that myself.
Now to resolve the global stuff in each file some of the initial globals are used, we got about 20-30 files which do different stuff, all fair and square, at least there was an attempt at seperating functions but god this mess is so fucking fucked up. So in order to "safely" delete a global variable I have to check if any of the variables are used in another file, and if so, in which scope and how they are used.
Spaghetti would be a compliment for this fucking disgusting piece of utter bullshit.
Let alone the code quality of this "code"
Indendation? Dafuq is dat?
Scope? Nah, we got everything global anyway
Function size? Well, some are 5 lines, some are 900 lines, who cares anyways, right?
I'm so fucking glad once I leave this shithole, for real.6 -
honestly some online courses are bullshit. i joined one for some sample code, and no comments, no explanations, the variable names WEREN'T even descriptive.
this is from a website with a published book… how about you take some fucking responsibility for your code?
the language was c++ and they are still using printf! shake my fucking head. you have global variables that are one fucking letter! please, stop, get help.
…AND IT WASN'T EVEN ON GITHUB -
Being assigned an old system that has scarce/cryptic documentation and uses global variables for everything. Not a maintenance nightmare at ALL.3
-
Today, I made an event-based gamepad library.
Although, I was lazy. I am planning on only supporting one controller so the library only supports one controller at a time. Plus, it uses some global variables.
But still, kinda fun
2 -
Global variables destroyed my day
Of course you can call me a bad programmer and all. When you have the idea, sometimes globals make it seem easy, accessible and "saving resources". They are devils.
The app was connected to a suite of applications. So I ended up silently destroying it neighbors. I committed and pushed the shit. Just when the testers made their weed high smoke tests, a server stopped working.
I got an email that boss wanted the latest version, I reverted the wrong branch, which had code unrelated to its name, pushed shit again and voila.
I went to the bathroom and laughed. I had to take a smoke. I'm still laughing while typing this. The damage is too much and I can't help it. I'll go home, leave this pc on and work remotely through the night. It might be the hysterics speaking now, but I messed up, and I need magic by friday morning.6 -
What do you think about class-based OOP vs. Prototype-based OOP?
I think that class-based OOP is an unnecessary abstraction of structs, functions and global variables most of the time.16 -
Spaghetti code
Mixing about 27 functionalities in an 800-lines-function accessing global variables.2 -
FML having to take on and support a python test framework that looks like it was written by a junior C embedded dev without a mentor.
- Imports everywhere in the code
- No abstraction or OOP
- sys.path.append fest (broken imports of course)
- Global variables fest
- No docstrings
- No readme
- Somehow mixed with a jUnit test framework as well
- Uses Windows environment variables profusely
- Pycharm has a stroke when I open files from this project5 -
!RANT
Oh, the SORROW that is JEST! 😡
Endless days have been swallowed by the abyss in my quest to configure Jest with TypeScript and ECMAScript modules instead of CommonJS. Triumph seemed within my grasp until - BAM! - suddenly the tool forgets what "import" or "export" means. And the kicker? On the CI, it still runs like nothing’s amiss!
Allow me to elucidate for the uninitiated: Jest is supposed to be a testing safeguard, a protective barrier insulating devs from the errors of their peers, ensuring a smooth, uninterrupted coding experience.
But OH, how the tables have turned when the very shield becomes the sword, stabbing me with countless, infuriating errors birthed from Jest’s own design decisions!
The audacity to reinvent the whole module loading process just to facilitate module mocking is mind-boggling! Imagine constructing an entirely new ecosystem just to allow people to pretend modules are something they're not. This is not just overkill; it's a preposterous reinvention of a wheel that insists on being a pentagon!
Sure, if devs want to globally expose their variables, entwining everything in a static context, so be it. BUT, why should we, who walk the righteous path of dependency injection, be subjugated to this configured chaos?!
My blood boils as the jestering Jest thrusts upon me a fragile, perpetually breaking system, punishing ME for its determination to support whole module mocking! A technique, mind you, that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, because, you know, DEPENDENCY INJECTION!
Where are the alternatives, you ask? Drowned in the abyss, it seems! Why can’t we embrace snapshots and all the delectable integrations WITHOUT being dragged through this module-mocking mire? Can’t module mocking just be a friendly sidekick, an OPTIONAL add-on, rather than the cruel dictator forcing its agenda upon our code?
Punish those clinging to their static contexts, their global variables – NOT those of us advocating for cleaner, more stable practices!
It’s high time we decouple the goodness of Jest from its built-in bad practices. Must we continue to dance with the devil to delight in the depth of Jest’s capabilities?
WHY, Jest, WHY?! 😭9 -
Just found a crystal subreport with 33 shared variables. For those who don't know what that is (lucky), they're super global variables that exist everywhere.
Please send help. I'm supposed to refactor this...19 -
You can say you know a computer language to a decent level when you can in fact make useful programs with it.
For example, I can say I know JavaScript to a basic level. I know its basic core functionality by heart (which can't be said for some people I know), such as:
- it manipulates the DOM, the DOM has Element, Nodes, TextNodes (all to be found on W3C documents with its own specs)
- useful functions are:
getElementById()
getElementsByClassName()
Also knowing that these return either HTMLElementCollection or NodeCollection because you have to iterate over it differently then
- element.textContent
- == and ===
- dynamic typing
- closures
- avoid global variables
- nodes have parentNodes
- isNaN, undefined
- arr.push()
- arguments don't have explicit types defined
- etc.
Using this knowledge I built an antispam script for a particular server. It's good to know the model of a language, that it sits in your head and that you can use and understand the constructs when you want and how you want.1 -
Is it sad that I look forward to the weekend so that I can actually write some code rather than:
- Helping clients that can’t / won’t read docs
- Explaining to test colleagues that we need repro steps and can’t fix a bug based on “I was doing something and it crashed”
- Writing any regular expressions for another dev where it’s more complicated than ^[A-Z0-9]*$
- Wading through legacy VBA that’s littered with GoTo, global variables (even i, j and k for loops are fucking global!) and all the other fucking lazy shortcuts that save you 10 seconds at dev time and cost you (which ends up meaning me) hours in subsequent debugging.
I love writing code, and I think I’m pretty good at it, so can I please just get on with it?
Fellow ranters, please tell me I’m not alone in this. -
I looked at an SQL server today from a customer, talked with one of their devs and he said that he's unable to understand why the server misbehaves... All (!) queries were optimized, but they have 'big data queries'... Migraine started, I had a very bad feeling. Monitoring? Nooooppeeee. Migraine kicks in. Connected to server. SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES...
After a bit of scrolling I found a lot of misconfigured variables (e.g. extreme large join buffers, unrealistic buffer sizes), high slow query count (nearly 60 % of COM_SELECT) and a few variables that were unknown to me.
Then came the version line.
5.0.46
Yes. 5.0.46.
Big data? Well... 30 GB of usage data.
I called the company back... The dev told me sternly that this was the production server (I had hope...) and that I lie - neither the version, nor the variables could be the problem.
A coworker had to verify it and our manager had to do the communication... Worst, most traumatic working day I ever had. -
Today I had to explay to a new developer, gradueated in Informatic, that our 15 year old php application uses global variables and strings as sql commands.
It seem to force someone to prostitution.
It's just like to drive a ferrari using a double-clutching because the gear is not syncronized.
I was shamed.
3 -
Good code is a lie imho.
When you see a project as code, there are 3 variables in most cases:
- time
- people / human resources
- rules
Every variable plays a certain role in how the code (project) evolves.
Time - two different forms: when certain parts of code are either changed in a high frequency or a very low frequency, it's a bad omen.
Too high - somehow this area seems to be relentless. Be it features, regressions or bugs - it takes usually in larger code bases 3 - 4 weeks till all code pathes were triggered.
Too low - it can be a good sign. But it should be on the radar imho. Code that never changes should be reviewed at an - depending on size of codebase - max. yearly audit. Git / VCS is very helpful here.
Why? Mostly because the chances are very high that the code was once written for a completely different requirement set. Hence the audit - check if this code still is doing the right job or if you have a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused.
People
If a project has only person working on it, it most certainly isn't verified by another person. Meaning that only one person worked on it - I'd say it's pretty bad to bad, as no discussion / review / verification was done. The author did the best he / she could do, but maybe another person would have had an better idea?
Too many people working on one thing is only bad when there are no rules ;)
Rules. There are two different kind of rules.
Styling / Organisation / Dokumentation - everything that has not much to do with coding itself. These should be enforced at a certain point, otherwise the code will become a hot glued mess noone wants to work on.
Coding itself. This is a very critical thing.
Do: Forbid things that are known to be problematic in the programming language itself. Eg. usage of variables in variables, reflection, deprecated features.
Do: Define a feature set for each language. Feature set not meaning every feature you want to use! Rather a fixed minimum version every developer must use and - in case of library / module / plugin support - which additional extras are supported.
Every extra costs. Most developers don't want to realize this... And a code base that evolves over time should have minimal dependencies. Every new version of an extra can have bugs, breakages, incompabilties and so on.
Don't: don't specify a way of coding. Most coding guidelines are horrific copy pastures from some books some smart people wrote who have no fucking clue what you're doing and why.
If you don't know how to operate on people, standing in an OR and doing what a book told you to do would end in dead person pretty sure. Same for code.
Learn from mistakes and experience, respect knowledge from other persons, but always reflect on wether this makes sense at this specific area of code.
There are very few things which are applicable to a large codebase on a global level. Even DRY / SOLID and what ever you can come up with can be at a certain point completely wrong.
Good code is a lie - because it can only exist at a certain point of time.
A codebase should be a living thing - when certain parts rot, other parts will be affected too.
The reason for the length of the comment was to give some hints on what my principles are that code stays in an "okayish" state, but good is a very rare state -
when you're working on a project you hate, and start naming global variables in profanity ($dick , $shit , $yourMother, etc...) to make it more enjoyable2
-
I’m so sorry if this is the place for questions. I’m terrified of stack overflow and have been searching for a week for a solution and can’t find one. This is for React.js people.
I was tasked to create a webpage with react. The limitation is, they did not wanna adopt the node.js dependency. I said ok, I’ll figure it out. You can inject react, material UI, and babel with script tags in HTML, then put ur lil components in it. I did that and it works beautifully.
However, now I have to write tests for this. I think it’s actually impossible without a way to render React, so I have to use the browser, or node, right? I convinced my boss to allow me to use a node.js container just for testing, which I thought would make my life easier.
I don’t know how to render this thing with node. It’s just an HTML file that pulls react via script tags, and idk how to serve html with node. Additionally, none of the React testing libraries seem to support testing a system that wasn’t designed to be served with node, at least not easily. My gut tells me that the complication with how things are imported contributes at least a little to this (dependencies pulled via script tags in the HTML file and made available to react through global const variables).
I could be wrong about any of this — im fairly new. But how tf do I go about testing these react components? For reference, if you go to Reacts docs, there’s a section called “add react to a page in one minute” that’s pretty much what I did.20 -
Doing someone else's Code Review in my project: "You must retain the holiness and piety of the code you write by following PascalCase naming for files and kebab-case naming for CSS variables. Avoid using duplicate strings by declaring enums in a constants.ts file and using that all throughout the app"
During my own Code Review in someone else's project: "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN I CANNOT PASS FUNCTION REFERENCES AS PROPS TO A REACT COMPONENT AND ALWAYS NEED TO INVOKE IT INSIDE AN INLINE FUNCTION FOR THE PROP."
"WHAT KINDA FKIN DRUGS ARE YOU ON TO USE snake_case IN TYPESCRIPT DID YOUR MOM DROP YOU ON YOUR HEAD WHEN YOU WERE BORN YOU SACRILEGIOUS PIECE OF SHIT"
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN I SHOULD USE BOTH SINGLE AND DOUBLE QUOTES FOR IMPORTS AS PER LOCAL OR GLOBAL; I'LL SHOVE THE SINGLE QUOTE UP YOU WHERE THE SUN DOESN'T SHINE YOU FKIN DEGENERATE MORON"
As much as I do believe in self righteousness of my own coding conventions over others (I might be slightly better than others but I really can't claim good authority because I've had my lapses in conventions too; and being one of the newer members of the team certainly doesn't help, despite my boss supporting my initiative), I guess it is high time we bring in some already established code conventions in the team that is finally big enough to warrant them. Maybe AirBnB. -
Aka... How NOT to design a build system.
I must say that the winning award in that category goes without any question to SBT.
SBT is like trying to use a claymore mine to put some nails in a wall. It most likely will work somehow, but the collateral damage is extensive.
If you ask what build tool would possibly do this... It was probably SBT. Rant applies in general, but my arch nemesis is definitely SBT.
Let's start with the simplest thing: The data format you use to store.
Well. Data format. So use sth that can represent data or settings. Do *not* use a programming language, as this can neither be parsed / modified without an foreign interface or using the programming language itself...
Which is painful as fuck for automatisation, scripting and thus CI/CD.
Most important regarding the data format - keep it simple and stupid, yet precise and clean. Do not try to e.g. implement complex types - pain without gain. Plain old objects / structs, arrays, primitive types, simple as that.
No (severely) nested types, no lazy evaluation, just keep it as simple as possible. Build tools are complex enough, no need to feed the nightmare.
Data formats *must* have btw a proper encoding, looking at you Mr. XML. It should be standardized, so no crazy mfucking shit eating dev gets the idea to use whatever encoding they like.
Workflows. You know, things like
- update dependency
- compile stuff
- test run
- ...
Keep. Them. Simple.
Especially regarding settings and multiprojects.
http://lihaoyi.com/post/...
If you want to know how to absolutely never ever do it.
Again - keep. it. simple.
Make stuff configurable, allow the CLI tool used for building to pass this configuration in / allow setting of env variables. As simple as that.
Allow project settings - e.g. like repositories - to be set globally vs project wide.
Not simple are those tools who have...
- more knobs than documentation
- more layers than a wedding cake
- inheritance / merging of settings :(
- CLI and ENV have different names.
- CLI and ENV use different quoting
...
Which brings me to the CLI.
If your build tool has no CLI, it sucks. It just sucks. No discussion. It sucks, hmkay?
If your build tool has a CLI, but...
- it uses undocumented exit codes
- requires absurd or non-quoting (e.g. cannot parse quoted string)
- has unconfigurable logging
- output doesn't allow parsing
- CLI cannot be used for automatisation
It sucks, too... Again, no discussion.
Last point: Plugins and versioning.
I love plugins. And versioning.
Plugins can be a good choice to extend stuff, to scratch some specific itches.
Plugins are NOT an excuse to say: hey, we don't integrate any features or offer plugins by ourselves, go implement your own plugins for that.
That's just absurd.
(precondition: feature makes sense, like e.g. listing dependencies, checking for updates, etc - stuff that most likely anyone wants)
Versioning. Well. Here goes number one award to Node with it's broken concept of just installing multiple versions for the fuck of it.
Another award goes to tools without a locking file.
Another award goes to tools who do not support version ranges.
Yet another award goes to tools who do not support private repositories / mirrors via global configuration - makes fun bombing public mirrors to check for new versions available and getting rate limited to death.
In case someone has read so far and wonders why this rant came to be...
I've implemented a sort of on premise bot for updating dependencies for multiple build tools.
Won't be open sourced, as it is company property - but let me tell ya... Pain and pain are two different things. That was beyond pain.
That was getting your skin peeled off while being set on fire pain.
-.-5 -
Composer.json require sendgrid
Composer adds wrong directions to file, fine I'll hard code it.
Composer is deriving file path.
Fine I'll edit 4 files.
Composer is escaping hard path
Change global variables
Composer is still adding its own directory before hard path.
Follow azure and sendgrid documentation to the letter, composer puts wrong way round slashes in file path.
Gives up on 57th server 500 error
Sometimes azure gets me down in its implementation of things.... -
TYPO3: You can use this hook to modify all links generated on the website. Well, all links except those few over there, which for some reason use a completely different class that does basically the same thing, and will even call your hook, but then ignore the result completely.
Me: Fuck you! I've spent almost a day trying to find the right hook, because they are all undocumented, have stupid names and every time I get close to a solution, some other part of your code decides to circumvent the hook.
Also me: After spending hours sifting through the depths of the TYPO3 core, I seriously wonder why it works at all. Spaghetti code, classes fetching properties directly instead of using the getters, loads of global variables... Wtf is wrong with that thing?
And people say WordPress is shitty code.1 -
Has anyone used YouTube iFrame API?
I do ask first here before going on SO.
I am trying to play a YouTube video in sync from 2 different computers.
Luckily YouTube iFrameAPI has an event called `onStateChange` that is fired every time a video is paused, played, stopped etc.
This is the scenario...
1. Host creates a session and sends the link to guest.
2. Guest connects with the host.
3. Host plays/pauses/goes to specific time in the vide the video. The video is synced on guest session.
Now I have to figure out how to sync when Guest does an action. The thing is, every time an event is triggered in Host, it sends the command to Guest. The guest obeys BUT THEN the event `onStateChange` is triggered on guest and sends the command to Host. It is an infinite loop that I cannot seem to figure out if the onStateChange is triggered from API or from User interaction.
What I have tried so far...
1. Global variables. No luck.
2. Disable the event handler when the guest is gets data from host and after it finishes syncing, activate the event handler. But the handler still triggers.
3. Timeframe. (an ugly one) . Checks when the last time that event was triggered. If it was less than 1.5 seconds (or other second), it does not send the commands to host.6 -
Is there anything like React Context or Unix envvars in any functional language?
Not global mutable state, but variables with a global identity that I can set to a value for the duration of a function call to influence the behavior of all deeply nested functions that reference the same variable without having to acknowledge them.13 -
I'm just beginning to learn about Javascript, and I'm not sure if I like the fact that variables, declared outside of functions, become global. How do other people feel about it?6
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Started developing an interest in programming after creating warcraft 3 maps using the world editor. I still remember those days where I used the gui trigger editor, where I don't even know the difference between local and global variables, preventing memory leaks by using leak check and etc. Creating new skills using triggers was so exciting. Then I discovered JASS, but I didn't really learn or use much about it. Now I'm working in Unity3D and it is awesome!2
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Hi, in my latest project I'm stuck on the CSS part.
I've already an Grunt + Sass Asset Generator for bootstrap.
The project has several (> 70) subpages aka modules.
The theming is client based, currently 4 clients with different colors.
At first I thought it was easy...
Splitting bootstrap to variables per client + bootstrap, so:
client1_variables.scss
client1_bootstrap.scss (including client1_variables).
client2_variables.scss
client2_bootstrap.scss
. . .
But now I'm stuck.
Reaason: The css classes are the same between the clients, eg client-bg-primary is the class.
I wanted to prevent generating for each client a folder - as every folder would contain the same content:
module/news/client1.scss
module/news/client2.scss
module/news/client3.scss
module/dashboard/client1.scss
module/dashboard/client2.scss
module/dashboard/client3.scss
...
Each SCSS file would only differ in the variable import...
Is there a way to prevent a Global Module CSS file for each client (as there are @##* fucking classes duplicated and I really don't want to untangle that mess) but not ending up with writing the same Code over and over?
The IRC sass channel is moderated, not possible to ask there... And when I google I find mostly themes based on an class approach (border-light vs border-dark)… :(2 -
i always get sucked into this "cute code" hell whenever i am working with a b2c codebase, and especially with kotlin code.
here's a scenario:
task : build a debounce logic for an input view where each user input is currently triggerring an api call.
my steps
1. read what debouncing is.
2. see if any code is available on the internet
=> found a code piece on the internet with some level of abstraction ( basically a simple final class that implements the input event callback and encapsulates the debounce logic)
3) copy it, run it , it wokrs
------
for any sane coder, these steps are hardly 10-30 mins and they can move on with life. but its your truly that made this task into a 6hour research only to come up at similar solution. my curiosity led me to stupid places
1) why this class is final? what if someone else wanna use it but with a different behaviour? lets try open(non final class) .
2) why even use a class? it extends an interface, lets try to wrap the logic in interface itself (kotlin supports interfaces that don't require implementation)
3) umm , the interface works but it looks ugly, with all its global overridden variables. what about we make it extension?
4) yeah the extension approach is also not very good, lets go back to open class.
5) but extend is super nice to look! lets keep the extension and open class too
6) can we optimise the implementation? why it uses an additional handler? what if we provided everything in constructor? how about builder pattern?
FUCK MY BRAIN! there are so much fucking options that i forgot that i spent 4 hours on this small thing
the simplest approach would have been tk just shove all the listeners and everything in activity and forget about it :/
senior devs on this platform, how do you stop yourself from adding every concept that you know into the smallest possible task?6 -
Sorta just had a realization but wanted to confirm if that's how it works.
@Bean adds the object to global objects collection?
And @AutoWired in a object returned in like @Bean ClassA classA() { return new ClassA(); }
Gets the instance from these global collections?
In which case Spring is just a way to use global variables/singletons... Isn't that like bad?14
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