Horrible enough for you?

[PIEBALDconsult]

dojohansen wrote:

the additional semi-colons

I used to do that with Pascal, so I could count them to know how many statements were in the program.

[VentsyV]

Whats wrong with the semi-colons; I put semi-colons everywhere; It is a C/C++ thing;

[Lutoslaw]

VentsyV wrote:

Whats wrong with the semi-colons; I put semi-colons everywhere; It is a C/C++ thing;

Yeah semicolons are cool; aren't they;

Greetings - Gajatko; Portable.NET is part of DotGNU; a project to build a complete Free Software replacement for .NET ; a system that truly belongs to the developers;

[Paul Conrad]

Perhaps it was more about all the try/catches with nothing really happening in the catch block.

"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer "Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon "Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham

[dojohansen]

But here the semi-colon adds an empty statement! This is a javascript function block with two statements:

function f()
{
a = 5;
++i;
}

The function itself is a declaration, not a statement, and adding a semicolon merely makes it a block with two statements followed by an empty statement. Admittedly the difference between a declaration and a statement is a bit fuzzy in this case, since in js a function declaration is equivalent to an assignment statement, like this:

var f = function()
{
a = 5;
++i;
};

In which case it's correct to include the semicolon (because it ends a statement in this case). Anyway, my real problem is the insane amount of reduncancy in the code. I declare war on copy-paste "programmers" the world over!

[dojohansen]

He was trying to copy a subset of xml data from one document to another (how this can be useful beats me unless you unload the document containing the superset of data, but anyway that's what he tried to do) but the data would not have the same nodes in all cases. Apparently upon discovering this he figured he'd just wrap the code copying each node into a try-catch so it continues if a node doesn't exist. This is a lazy approach and a coding horror in my book. First, the cost of catching exceptions instead of checking if nodes exist before trying to clone them is *huge*. Second, in most cases the try block can fail for other reasons than the one which "is ok" and means you should just go on. This project is plagued by that particular problem, people catch an exception because they want the program to "keep working" but of course all it does is make it fail in strange ways while leaving no useful debugging information. It's worse when they do this server-side since the client-side exceptions aren't so rich on information anyway but the principle is the same. My real gripe however is the code redundancy. If you intend to perform the same operation 20 times over you should use the same implementation 20 times, so it's possible to change the darn thing without getting bored to death. I also think that if the operation is of a fairly generic nature, say, copying a subset of xml nodes from one document to another, you should separate the logic from any particular bits of the systems such as, say, a specific web page in a complex application. The guy is now Chef de projet développements (not for my team thankfully) and continues to wreak havoc at undiminished speed. An example of what he might have written instead:

function copyChildNodes(srcNode, destNode, nodeList, ignoreMissingNodes)
{
for (var i=0; i < nodeList.length; i++)
{
var node = srcNode.selectSingleNode(nodeList[i]);
if (!node)
{
if (ignoreMissingNodes)
continue;
else
throw {message: "No child node with name '" + nodeList[i] + "' exists in the source node."};
}
destNode.appendChild(node.cloneNode(true));
}
}

Put that in one of our several script files intended for code a little bit more general than the page-specfic stuff and put this in the page (instead of the twenty lines doing the same thing):

var nodes = ["block_name", "block_type", "title", "list_id", "you", "get", "the", "point"];
copyChildNodes(o

[rcollina]

Seen something very similar from a guy who sells the source code of his application for more than 2000 dollars. He said that using try catch blocks like it's going out of fashion is "covering every base". ...the horror. :(

[Dan Neely]

dojohansen wrote:

My real gripe however is the code redundancy. If you intend to perform the same operation 20 times over you should use the same implementation 20 times, so it's possible to change the darn thing without getting bored to death.

What are you talking about, that just means you get to have fun writing an overly complex regex to update the code with. :rolleyes:

Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall

[Tom1]

Sadly, had a boss one time that changed my code from using an array and a loop_index to code that looks like the example. Perhaps we were being paid per line of source code generated?

[cpkilekofp]

CIDev wrote:

Yes, the current developers always get the heat for things that may have been done years before they even started working at the company. Such is life

Can anyone say "Refactoring"? I've spent a good deal of my career refactoring bad code, even when I had to do it on the sly to keep "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" bosses from burying me in manure. If it's bad code, it IS broken and needs to be fixed. If your life sucks, you're working by the wrong set of rules.

[cpkilekofp]

dojohansen wrote:

I declare war on copy-paste "programmers" the world over!

To the death!!! :laugh:...alright, To the death or reform!! (I've been guilty of this occasionally as well, especially when I was in a screaming hurry...but it's VERY rare that I've left copy-and-paste stuff in my code longer than the first moment I could go back and revise it).

[BillW33]

I normally "tweak" or just plain replace old code that may work, but is really bad code. I don't always have enough time to replace as much bad code as I would like, but I do it whenever possible. Bill W

[cpkilekofp]

CIDev wrote:

I normally "tweak" or just plain replace old code that may work, but is really bad code. I don't always have enough time to replace as much bad code as I would like, but I do it whenever possible.

I know what you mean :( I'm in the process of finally, COMPLETELY refactoring an application created by an entry-level programmer in .NET 1.0. It's not terrible, considering her skill level and the state of Visual Studio.NET at that time, but it wasn't good. I'm guessing that the size of the code in both .aspx and .aspx.vb files has decreased by half. It only took me four years to get enough knowledge of .NET and ASP.NET, then to get permission to go for it :laugh:

[cliran]

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: feel sorry for you..