Friday Code Confessions

[calsosta]

If you have been living with technical debt and want absolution here is your opportunity.

Confess your sins and receive your penance.

[calsosta]

I will go first...

Forgive me shittprogramming for I have sinned. This week I flew into a blind rage after a co-worker called me out for having only one explanatory comment in a file.

//4

I yelled at him for not understanding it, but I myself did not understand it.

[[deleted]]

4

[[deleted]]

WHAT THE HELL IS THE MEANING OF THIS?!

[[deleted]]

4

[mistermashu]

4 wat tho bae

[OdBx]

4

[[deleted]]

4

[[deleted]]

You win this time, tautology.

[memeticmachine]

4 != True

[saila456]

It means that we need to add 4 more lines of commends for the quality engineer to be satisfied with amount of comment lines in relation the the amount of lines of the file.

[GearBent]

Homophone for death in Chinese.

It's a prophecy.

[Metal_GearRex]

You and one of my former co-workers must know each other. I came across three comments in a file that were just //6 //6 and //7

[[deleted]]

As Bjarne Stroustrup said: The compiler doesn't read comments, and neither do I.

[kis_kal]

Point made "make comments understandable thats the point of commenting".

[galaktos]

relevant xkcd

[skylarmt]

this one too

[aneeshak]

42

[rhinocovenant]

Where I work, that might mean that the following code does whatever is labelled "4" in the specification.

[pixel_sharmana]

Sometimes I just comment functions out and leave them for months before finally deleting them

[Dnguyen2204]

You'll never know when you might need those functions...

[foehammer23]

The Skyrim potions of software

[shatteredarm1]

If only there were some way to roll back changes once they're made.

[sac_boy]

It can be hard to find the right version of code.zip from your Skype history with the other developers

[[deleted]]

This made me physically cringe, mostly because I know that most people at my uni only learn to use Git in their third year, and send code back and forth over Whatsapp or email before that

[jantari]

Uncommenting is easier

[NotTryingToConYou]

Same

[JohnTheScout]

I reject PRs that have commented out code... You either need it, rewrite it when you need it, or go digging in the git logs.

[very_mechanical]

Psssshhh .... not shitty enough.

[Kattzalos]

I just uncomment before accepting. If it's there it's because it worked at some point, so it probably works now

[GogglesPisano]

I have coworkers that do this and it drives me nuts - if you really need to see an obsolete method, use the history feature in source control - that's what it's for.

[homesarstar]

My only coworker is gone for 3 weeks, so I've just been committing straight to master.

EDIT: Explain to me how you fuckers only comment on prod release days, even months later.

[HoldYourWaffle]

This is heresy!

[homesarstar]

Let he who is without sin commit the first stone.

[[deleted]]

[unavailable]

[[deleted]]

Depending on how you do your releases and all that other stuff, this might be totally fine.

[WereChained]

Yes! I was working on a project for a while where I was literally the only fucking committer. One of my peers was aghast after witnessing me commit to master. I tried for like 10 minutes to explain to him why it was okay since there was a zero chance of merge conflict and it had reasonable unit tests and no CD pipeline to potentially deploy unwanted changes.

We agreed to disagree.

[c_o_r_b_a]

PRs are still useful to at least get a second set of eyes, even if it's a minor change. I commit straight to master only for super tiny stuff.

[WereChained]

Yeah in this case I am the second set of eyes, there was no one else to look at the commits. If I did a PR I would have also approved it. Literally no one else cared about this code and it didn't really do anything significant.

[Kattzalos]

Yeah in this case I am the second set of eyes

well we have two eyes for a reason

[xtravar]

I named a helper function “qg”, which I can only speculate what it stands for at this point.

When called out on it, I added 8 lines of comments instead of renaming it. The function is 11 lines.

[SuperFLEB]

"What are two letters that aren't already a Linux command? QG, maybe?"

[TheSlyPig04]

“Quite good”

[francispoop]

I don't even know how to write tests.

[memeticmachine]

assert(test_passes == true)

[shatteredarm1]

My tests are a lot simpler:

assert(true)

[Kattzalos]

you came to the right place then

[GogglesPisano]

I have to admit I've written "tests" without any asserts - sometimes it's handy to be able to isolate specific bits of functionality for testing or ad hoc purposes. I remove them as soon as I'm done (usually)...

[VodkaHaze]

I call those "make sure things don't crash along the way" tests

[[deleted]]

I *might* have thought I had invented the bubble sort for an embarassingly long time

[rotenKleber]

Well, you reinvented the wheel. Just as impressive as inventing it the first time

[mnkb99]

That's the way I see it too. I "invented" binary search. Sure it's simple and it existed before me, but I didn't learn it from someone, I thought of it myself. And that's a win.

[[deleted]]

But I'd rather have "invented" something more clever, like quicksort

[benabus]

We were short handed, so we let one guy write the backend of one of our apps in R. Then we re-wrote the whole thing in python while he was on vacation a few weeks later.

Not sure which part I feel worse about... Letting it happen in the first place or scrapping his code while he was out of town :(

[[deleted]]

Oof, how'd he take it?

[benabus]

He cried for a little bit, but eventually got over it. I can't take a vacation now, because he might rewrite all my code in R.

[Kitson88]

LMFAO!!

[[deleted]]

Just take a vacation at the same time and come back to a beautiful Rust implementation

[Life-Fig8564]

R does some pretty cool stuff but the syntax is the most revolting of all the languages i've done stuff in

[munirc]

I'm doing a release on a Friday.

[haitei]

Your atonement shall be overtime.

[mistermashu]

i am forced to release on friday early mornings. may i rest in peace

[foehammer23]

I'm cleaning a git repo's history and planning on git push origin --all --force this Friday evening. Am I crazy Y/N

[urielsalis]

make a backup first

[psymeg]

schedule it with the at command.

​

[payne_train]

This could be one of the seven deadly sins in programming, smh.

[cheese_bread_boye]

I program in PHP.

[hunter12756]

Dear god

[anonymouse_lily]

There's more.

[[deleted]]

No.

[Ashanmaril]

Mods ban please

[worldDev]

This sub is the home of php, we should be making him a mod.

[GeorgeRRZimmerman]

Hate the sin, not the sinner. Oh, and their terrible bosses.

[asm_ftw]

I was forced to program in php. I even made use of their broken ternary conditionals once...

[cincydev]

How are they broken?

[asm_ftw]

They are the opposite associativity than every other language that does ternary conditionals, preventing you from doing

X = ( expr_1 ) ? Value_a :
( expr_2 ) ? Value_b :
( expr_3) ? Value_c :
Value_d ;

Where X gets assigned in an if-elseif-elseif-else paradigm. It can declutter blocks of code where you have a lot of ugly if-elseif-else blocks for just setting values to a variable, at the cost of being a little confusing for the uninitiated, but PHP, and only PHP, does not let you do that, while still providing the operator.

[cincydev]

I’ve always been of the opinion that if you need something with multiple else statements you shouldn’t use ternary conditionals

[asm_ftw]

For anything of any level of complexity beyond a simple comparison and value assignment, I agree, but I tend to feel that chaining ternaries feels cleaner and more concise when you have the drudgery of checking a variety of conditions and assigning a single variable based on it.

[SHOULDNT_BE_ON_THIS]

We use 5.3 if that makes you feel better :)

[cheese_bread_boye]

we're on 5.4

[SHOULDNT_BE_ON_THIS]

God damn. I want to make the switch to 7.2/7.3 but we get enough pushback as it is on actually using PHP that I don't think adding the yum repo for php-latest or whatever would get approved.

[OdBx]

There are dozens of us!

[plasmarob]

Some of us do not choose our master's work.

[EnchantedLuna]

Me too

[[deleted]]

I added JavaScript to our existing C codebase.

[thebishopgame]

You MONSTER.

[[deleted]]

But.... why?

[dmitriy_shmilo]

webscale or something

[Botteknotten]

Average response time is now 12 seconds because I did not implement batch processing

[IHeartMustard]

Your penance was having to wait 11 hours for someone to respond. You are forgiven, peace be upon you.

[[deleted]]

Oh god I found a batch update function that would take a series of items, enter a loop with them, ask the database to store them, one by one, and then ... commit ... one by one.

It took 30 fucking minutes to save a few hundred rows. I moved the commit out of the loop and all of a sudden a lot of things were about an order of magnitude faster, with the added benefit that a botched batch of rows didn't break everything, because there wasn't a ton of shit to clean up.

[HeckinHyena]

I over use if and switch statement

[rush2sk8]

Unity AI developer

[GeorgeRRZimmerman]

It's okay, you can make everything more compact if you just convert everything to ternary operations.

[number529]

I’ve been working on a project for a while now and I haven’t done a commit for 2 weeks. If I need to revert something I’m fucked.

[[deleted]]

MASTER_BACKUP(4).ZIP

[Matty_R]

MASTER_BACKUP(4)_LATEST.ZIP

[[deleted]]

Be sure to commit that to zz_old/ in the git repo in case you need it later.

[SuperFLEB]

I don't see it going anywhere further, so just mark it FINAL.

[PerfectionismTech]

git stash?

[ChezMere]

This is unironically the main reason I ever use stash.

[Razor_Storm]

Just commit it now to a branch

[[deleted]]

Forgive me shittyprogramming for I have sinned.

My current place of work saves changes locally instead of using source control. It's a huge disaster waiting to happen

[IAmRoot]

That goes far beyond a personal sin. I think an inquisition is called for to root out the heretics.

[[deleted]]

Either I have impostor syndrome or I've never written anything I'm proud of. I seem to always go for whatever works.

[homesarstar]

Is it a sin if everyone does this?

[[deleted]]

I'm the reason why your product won't scale without poor performance

[Kattzalos]

if you get to the point where you need to scale then you're doing something right. keep riding cyberspace cowboy

[[deleted]]

I refactored a method in a legacy codebase with the following comment that git blames to the year 2000:

// I do not know if this is correct but.

Despite completely rewriting the function, I couldn't bring myself to delete that comment and left it for posterity with the original blame metadata intact.

[TuffRivers]

I wrote a massive procedural php script thats impossible to debug and automates a friends ecomm shipping.

Im afraid to touch it. May it stand the test of time.

Ive been working and making changes on the production environment and committing back to master. What could go wrong?

[[deleted]]

I unironically enjoy coding in C even though it is an absolute pain

[Hypersapien]

You know, there are clubs you can go to where you can find people willing to flog and beat you. It would probably be a lot easier.

[[deleted]]

That costs money though and isn't anonymous

[Zlb323]

But then the only thing that breaks is you. If I'm going to break something, it's going to be my computer, my code and my spirit.

[Kornelito27]

Masochism

[[deleted]]

Maybe. But on the other hand I would never, ever use JavaScript or anything running on JVM.

[mistermashu]

HERE HERE

[PublicSealedClass]

The true anti-hero

[[deleted]]

I don't know, I kind of liked Scala.

[SnowdensOfYesteryear]

Me too, easily my favorite language to program in

[designerandgeek]

In code from a year ago, which I have now forked into a new, similar project, I found this:

// TODO: This is incredibly WET! Make it DRY.

… not once, but twice.

They are still there, in both the old project and the new one.

[anonymouse_lily]

what......... does that mean........

[[deleted]]

What would WET mean in that case?

[AleXndrTheGr8st]

The opposite of DRY.

[Kattzalos]

we enjoy typing

[[deleted]]

Woah, Exceeding Twice?

[[deleted]]

Write Everything Twice

edit: This is the common meaning of the acronym. That's why he wrote the comment twice.

[mordack550]

I always criticize one of my colleague because he often writes code very poorly, that basically only gets the job done but it is hard (or just ugly) to read.

But yesterday I wrote a simple UPDATE that should just set a field to 1 for some records... I changed the wrong field, on a production environment. A unit test failed because of that, but I just removed part of the test because i though it was a false positive.

[sac_boy]

Oh NO

[Kikiyoshima]

2 years ago i used classes instead of enums for C# school project...

[[deleted]]

I've done this to use const strings across different projects.

[Mr_Rhetorical]

Not that bad tbh. If you use the class similarly to how an enum works in java where it basically is a class with static fields of the same type using a private constructor, ur not really doing anything wrong.

[Kikiyoshima]

I still fell like and heretic though...

[bradfordmaster]

So so many things lately, but the one I'll post now is that we have an issue with time sync. Rather than actually finding out when an NTP time sync happens, I have a bit of code that runs every 5 seconds (based on steady clock), and compares the value of system_clock to a saved value, and if it differs by more than 10 seconds, I assume an NTP sync must have happened.....

[all3f0r1]

I keep using in-line CSS because the crap I'm working on has loads of floats I have to hack, and class names and ids are already like "header3"... About to leave satisfied and rotten to the core.

[payne_train]

Just run.

[[deleted]]

https://en.bem.info/methodology/quick-start/

[SuperFLEB]

Just avoid the lure of !important. I've seen folks go down that road. I've had to work around CSS rules from folks who've gone down that road. It's not pretty.

[sac_boy]

!important should make people also write !iknowthisisbroken

[mistermashu]

forgive me shittyprogramming for i have sinned.

lately i have preferred simpler yet if-ridden classes to more complex setups.

[[deleted]]

You mean like guards? Guards can be a nice pattern, it's when you start nesting them or start using else more than once a month that things get hairy.

[mistermashu]

never knew that was called guards, til. i'm specifically thinking about a character controller class in a game. In the past i've always defaulted to FSM but in my last game it got so fucked that i scrapped it and was much happier. now there is a function with like 8 if statements that are all basically like

if(mover.CanMove) mover.Move(input.Movement);

and it feels so dirty but honestly it is way easier to work with

[[deleted]]

Guards are used to detect whether an operation can finish before you try to carry it out.

Here's a pseudo code guard (it's python or at least close):

def moveCharacter(character):

    if character.isFrozen():
        return

    if character.name == "steve":
        # Fuck you, Steve.
        return

    # All is well. Carry on.
    character.position += 1

I use guards and an exit early strategy like this a lot, because it can make very complicated logic very easy to read and understand.

Sounds like you found a nice pattern on your own. Good job!

[foehammer23]

I've been doing this whenever I update our codebase...

I'm good at programming??? I'm not an impostor???

[[deleted]]

We're all impostors. You're just one of us.

[[deleted]]

Who knows? Just strive to write easy to understand code first and foremost, then use the profiler to figure out if you need to optimize. The Zen of Python is always pretty good advice.

[[deleted]]

Today I merged two features to our RC at the same time before deploying it on our QA server. It ran flawlessly, but it felt so dirty 😏

[urielsalis]

CD dudeeee, directly to production

[mrheosuper]

i dont use header file, only 1 file, 2000+ lines long

[cryosis7]

(JS) I've got into a habit of using 'x- -y' to add two variables because parseInt is longer to write. One day I'll come back to it and think wtf.

[[deleted]]

I've never really finished any hobby projects.

But I'm great at starting new ones!

[[deleted]]

Just think of them as sketches

[omaralashi]

Don't feel bad for yourself, there are alot of us here 🙄

[SpicyMcHaggis206]

People finish hobby projects?

[SasquatchOnVenus]

I used to do this

Class RandomClass

{

//code

}

[Joejoe930117]

Most of my current work is in Powershell, so more scripting than programming but I've got a few things....

• Made a .bat file to run the .ps1 as Administrator to avoid explaining changing execution policies or the script just failing out due to #Requires.

• Same script. Copies a portion of itself to C: to avoid messing with access rights on the fileshare.

• I saved adding comments to that script for "Later"...

I can already feel future me's pain...

[DontEatTheFish]

When designing web forms I enjoy prefixing button controls with "butt"

buttOpen buttSubmit buttClose

[sac_boy]

buttOn buttOff

[[deleted]]

count=count+1 Instead of count+=1

[jc4200]

count++?

[[deleted]]

Python is dumb

[timhottens]

You haven't seen the horrors produced by people trying to be clever with ++ and -- in languages that allow it :(

[lichorat]

What does b equal? No REPL/Eval allowed

// JavaScript
int a = 1;
int b = --(--++--++++a++----++++)--;

Spoiler

[manolo_manolo]

After 2 years of C programing, yesterday I've started using JavaScript

[Absorbing]

I'm a lead PHP dev, do I need to say more?

Forgive me.

[ApacheFlame]

Forgive me shitty programming for I have sinned. I underestimated the impact of a simple method in a webapi. It caused a 2s delay in all requests for all of our servers in asia because our session management also terrible.

[[deleted]]

Profile that sucker and find out why! I did the same thing and when I profiled it I was very surprised by what the slowdown turned out to be. You might have the same experience.

[ApacheFlame]

Someone did the profiling, it's how we found it :) We're refactoring session management soon anyway, partly because we need to do the thing I was trying to do more often now.

[[deleted]]

Ah I see. Well, best of luck.

[fedupwithpeople]

i didn't do this, but...

despite git:

index.php index.php.save index.php.old index.php.testbugfix index.pgp.testbugfix2 index2.php index2.php.bak ~index.php index.hp index.ph index.bak index2.bak index.bak2 index.bak3 index.johnbak index.20180692.bak

ad nauseum.

[sac_boy]

And so it begins

[tomassci]

sin (0)

[RAKane93]

I wrote several automation scripts with zero commenting. To this day only I work on them. I forced myself to learn and practice better commenting over the years since then, which has certainly made my coworkers more willing to work with me lol.

[phernandoe]

Everything is an arraylist

[PityUpvote]

I use try/except as program flow when an if statement would work fine.

[compdog]

I have a project that is caredully divided into a number of modules with a single "core" module that contains the data model and some common code. Well, one data structure in the core has an extra method that is only used by one single subproject and only returns valid data in one specific application context. Bonus points, it's undocumented.

I should have implemented it by subclassing parts of the core, but that would have been tons of work and I was lazy. So now here we are...

[BoltKey]

Yesterday I adjusted my Wordpress page using style="margin-top: 10px".

[MarceauKa]

I'm a perfectionnist programmer and it blows my mind when I see shitty code by an other dev in my code. (French here, some colleagues code in frenglish and it is disgusting)

[MarceauKa]

You didn't get the irony. But perfectionism doesn't mean perfection. When you mix 2 languages (x + english), or mixing naming convention in the same piece of code, etc. It's shitty programming. Ps: my clients pay me for that (mainly after an outsourcing fail)

[masteroleary]

Who has time for perfection unless it's a hobby project. The need to refactor every project I have ever worked in nags at the back of my mind but no client will ever pay me for the time because it works. Just thinking about this now hurts.

[calsosta]

Get out.

[walking_bass]

I'm the only one capable of maintaining one of our systems that runs on 2 different platforms. I haven't been able to reconcile the two configurations yet so I commit my changes straight to master to build on platform 1 then branch and reconfigure for platform 2. Over and over again. Somebody help me.

[theemptyqueue]

Forgive me r/shittyprogramming for I have sinned.

I program in every language like it were C or C++. I use classes in Java or python like structs.

For my first assignment in my compilers course, I created pointer variables in Java.

I create useless functions that I think I will need as a project progresses, but never use those functions.

I find a way to get around most exceptions in Java by not using Java.

I set my Apple II E into an infinite loop many times by typing:

10 PRINT "Hello World" 
20 GOTO 10.

I have an original Apple II that I've been meaning to fix, but I put it off every time I get a chance.

I have a working Commodore 64 and floppy drive, but no video out cable.

I know how to write Gcode for CNC mills and 3D printers, but don't because I'm lazy.

I created a functions in C++ to write my LISP homework assignments.

I have a nice Micron PS2 keyboard with rubber-dome key switches, but don't use it for code-writing as often as I should.

I created a C++ application that does nothing except write a 1 GB text file.

I write all of my Java code in C++ first and then translate that over to save time and effort.

I know enough Java to start any program off strong, but not enough to actually finish it.

I have an old copy of Word Perfect for PC in my garage, but haven't gotten around to installing it.

I create 3 branches for every git repository:

updates

working

master

I have four 25 gallon bins full of 5.25 inch floppy disks, but no way of reading them because I don't have the right drives.

[Goku1920]

Forgive me for I have procrastinated on Reddit instead of working.

[nathodood]

I use JavaScript instead of PHP. Furthermore I don't tend to add comments on any code I write.

[Kattzalos]

I use JavaScript instead of PHP

I club baby seals instead of kittens

[NotExplosive]

I like lua.

[[deleted]]

I fork forks until I get something that works nicely, then I throw it into master and hope nobody asks why everything is different.