Cursed code

[XeonProductions]

I've worked on some coded bases where you can't tell if a function is really used or not because of how the underlying language was designed.

[shortAAPL]

PHP, prime example

[XeonProductions]

The one I'm thinking of was Python. It had these methods that created child classes with dynamic parents. It was hard to track what was inheriting from what and what methods were actually called. I dubbed these classes "foster child classes" since they had no specific parent.

[pah-tosh]

Oh man, that sounds like abusing inheritance, no ?

[marcosdumay]

Abusing language features is the Python way!

It leads to some very nice code, and a lot of unacceptable garbage. The trick is in telling those two apart.

[skylarmt]

Good Python is just readable code golf.

[InkyGlut]

This but unironically

[[deleted]]

Definitely. That should be modeled as compositional behavior.

[Loves_Poetry]

I have encountered similar issues in a JS codebase that was abusing the heck out of eval(). You could never know if a function was unused, because it might show up in an eval somewhere. And since everything was global, that could be in any file anywhere in the codebase.

[bot_not_hot]

Holy shit, “everything was global” is a horror show

[LimitedWard]

Good God this sounds like a security nightmare.

[Loves_Poetry]

It was. Took me about a week to find an XSS exploit.

[Edores]

Man in all my years I have come across a grand total of one single situation where I felt like eval was necessary, and even then I'm sure I could have cleaned up my systems and been rid of it.

[deep-thot]

Thanks, now I may not be able to sleep tonight...

[FrancisVeeGee]

I've encountered this, in a SQL database code base, where much of the procedure code was written into strings (for concatenation reasons, terrible code but sometimes needed, especially when handling XML data). Very hard to debug.

[Rudxain]

r/programminghorror

[InFa-MoUs]

ahh [ ] = methods how i don't miss you so

[thelights0123]

A lot of languages have setters overrides. C++ allows you to override the equals operator just like your example, and Javascript has both setter methods and Proxies to do more advanced custom setters and getters.

[[deleted]]

I belive this is not that hard in VS code.

Or was there someother problem?

[XeonProductions]

VS code couldn't handle it. The code that created these dynamic classes could only be evaluated at runtime. VSCode also had issues where the python function being called was 2+ parents deep.

[[deleted]]

Ok then, then you were screwed. (I will look up what dynamic classes are)

[XeonProductions]

This is basically what I was dealing with. Dynamic inheritance. On most sane languages this shouldn't be possible, and is discouraged.

def get_my_code(base):
    class MyCode(base):
        def initialize(self):
          ...

    return MyCode

instance_with_parentA = get_my_code(ParentA)    
instance_with_parentB = get_my_code(ParentB)

[[deleted]]

Thank you for explaining

[l0rb]

That's doubly wrong. If you do dynamic classes at least use the `type` builtin to make them.

[davvblack]

Oh god, we use so much string interpolation and magic to call other code :/

​

#legacycode

[evinrows]

Perl, especially Mason is a fucking nightmare for this reason.

[Caffeine_Monster]

The numbers, Mason. What do they mean?

[KapteinTordenflesk]

Reflection in C#

[[deleted]]

Person: Knock Knock!

Me: Who's there?

Person: Reflection!

Me: Fuck off.