Worst source code EVER
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Now that's easy. It was the program I was hired to replace on my current job. When I first saw it I wanted to publish its complete source code with some annotations at the juiciest parts. There was not one single part in it that I would have kept and the bosses would have liked me to patch it until it works. I told them it was hopeless and in the end I wound up writing an entirely new application. It took me almost a year, but it has been online since last december and, up to now, had only one minor display bug to fix. What was so bad about the old one? Where shall I begin? 1) The database was a mess. The 'developer' did not have the slightest clue what primary keys are for, also had a very shaky grasp of database relations and also allowed nulls in each and every field in each and every table (minus the few keys which were actually defined). The data was imported daily from SAP, so nulls should not occur, but this made it easier for him to sweep errors during the import under the rug. 2) The 'developer' had never heard of object orientation. His 'classes', except for the ASP .Net web pages were all static with static methods, some of those methods thousands of lines of spaghetti code long. 3) Exceptions were only caught at the most buggy locations and always wound up in empty catch blocks. Errors were always swept under the rug. No logging, no message to the user. Stop!here was exactly one location where the catch block was not empty! There an email message like 'An error has occured' was sent to the developer. No information about the parameters entered by the user. No exception message, no stack trace. Just 'An error has occured'. On really bad days I got hundreds of those meaningless messages. This was also the first thing I patched up to get at least some information on what the users were trying to do and what happened then. 4) The 'developer' had never heard about layers or tiers. Everything was freely mixed and mingled over the web pages' code behind or his static methods. 5) There were no separate methods for data access. There was one monstrous method, thousands of lines long, which took about three dozen parameters, then constructed SQL statements in endless spaghetti code and last tried to fill a dataset with rows from all tables. If the user requested too much data, this would result in a out of memory exception on a very well equipped server. Also, he tried to enforce constraints on the tables in the datasets. The very constraints which he failed to enforce in the database itself. Th
"The data was imported daily from SAP" But wait... I thought SAP did everything. Aren't all of those annoying little side-apps with their interface and import requirements supposed to just go away after a successful SAP implementation? And shouldn't costly, difficult-to-manage programmers be a thing of the past? Or was I misled on these points?
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Okay, last day or so ago, I asked what your favorite programming job was. Now, what is the worst, nastiest, ugliest source code you ever saw and what made it so horribly bad? Not commented (heh heh yeah, as if) or one-letter (or zero-letter?) variable names? Written in a dead programming language that should be dead, but your client is still using it for some God-awful reason? The list goes on...so spew!
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
I did FoxPro for many years. FoxPro is NOT strongly typed and allows public variables. Most experienced developers never use them for obvious reasons. I worked on one very large app that had over a hundred public variables. In some of the modules would be private variables of the same name that simple copied the public value into it:
PUBLIC SomeVar
SomeVar = DATETIME()
.
.
.then later elsewhere
FUNCTION XYX()
PRIVATE someVar
someVar = SomeVar.IF x = 1
someVar = 10
ENDIFENDFUNC
Simple example, but there were hundreds of these public/private combinations all over the app, and you had no idea what was in a variable until you stepped through it or it crashed.
Everything makes sense in someone's mind
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Okay, last day or so ago, I asked what your favorite programming job was. Now, what is the worst, nastiest, ugliest source code you ever saw and what made it so horribly bad? Not commented (heh heh yeah, as if) or one-letter (or zero-letter?) variable names? Written in a dead programming language that should be dead, but your client is still using it for some God-awful reason? The list goes on...so spew!
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
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A month or two ago I got to see this Java codebase that I was supposed to work on; whoever wrote it apparently was a fan of this incredibly awesome (NOT!) paradigm I like to call "Hashtable Oriented Programming"... Basically, all business-tier classes implement a BusinessObject interface, which contains four methods: loadFromDb, saveToDb, a third one I can't remember, and the infamous getHashtable... The classes themselves do indeed implement these methods... and nothing else - no bean-style getters or setters! That's right, a Loan object has the exact same structure as a Realtor object; the only difference is the convention of "which keys do we stick in the hashtable?" It's almost as if they were trying to implement some sort of dynamically typed language on top of Java... just with none of the advantages, and all of the disadvantages! Thankfully I've been transferred to another project, so I don't have to mess with that nonsense! edit: Now I remember what the third method was... it was isInDb! This method was implemented rather... erratically, one might say: several of the classes implemented it by executing "select count(*) from theTable" and comparing to zero; if the count was not zero, the object was "in" the database! And no, I doubt that there were all THAT many "singleton tables" in the DB!
ekolis wrote:
It's almost as if they were trying to implement some sort of dynamically typed language on top of Java
Probably exactly that except they didn't know that was what they were doing. They thought they were 'generalizing' it and making it more 'maintainable'. I see designs like that quite often in database layers.
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In over a year at my current job I have not come across a single line of documentation or comments. Thousands upon thousands of lines of code. 20+ projects.
"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. " — Hunter S. Thompson My comedy.
When I interviewed for my current job and I was pointedly and specifically asked about documentation I knew what I was in for. Sure enough, none of the apps my predecessor wrote were documented. He was too good to document.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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A month or two ago I got to see this Java codebase that I was supposed to work on; whoever wrote it apparently was a fan of this incredibly awesome (NOT!) paradigm I like to call "Hashtable Oriented Programming"... Basically, all business-tier classes implement a BusinessObject interface, which contains four methods: loadFromDb, saveToDb, a third one I can't remember, and the infamous getHashtable... The classes themselves do indeed implement these methods... and nothing else - no bean-style getters or setters! That's right, a Loan object has the exact same structure as a Realtor object; the only difference is the convention of "which keys do we stick in the hashtable?" It's almost as if they were trying to implement some sort of dynamically typed language on top of Java... just with none of the advantages, and all of the disadvantages! Thankfully I've been transferred to another project, so I don't have to mess with that nonsense! edit: Now I remember what the third method was... it was isInDb! This method was implemented rather... erratically, one might say: several of the classes implemented it by executing "select count(*) from theTable" and comparing to zero; if the count was not zero, the object was "in" the database! And no, I doubt that there were all THAT many "singleton tables" in the DB!
ekolis wrote:
"which keys do we stick in the hashtable?"
Sounds like a fan of Perl.
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Okay, last day or so ago, I asked what your favorite programming job was. Now, what is the worst, nastiest, ugliest source code you ever saw and what made it so horribly bad? Not commented (heh heh yeah, as if) or one-letter (or zero-letter?) variable names? Written in a dead programming language that should be dead, but your client is still using it for some God-awful reason? The list goes on...so spew!
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
Probably the VB.net I had to work on last year... but there was also the this C code I wrote back in '94...
#define begin {
#define end }
#define then /**/
#define mod %
#define and &&
#define or ||:-O
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Okay, last day or so ago, I asked what your favorite programming job was. Now, what is the worst, nastiest, ugliest source code you ever saw and what made it so horribly bad? Not commented (heh heh yeah, as if) or one-letter (or zero-letter?) variable names? Written in a dead programming language that should be dead, but your client is still using it for some God-awful reason? The list goes on...so spew!
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
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Okay, last day or so ago, I asked what your favorite programming job was. Now, what is the worst, nastiest, ugliest source code you ever saw and what made it so horribly bad? Not commented (heh heh yeah, as if) or one-letter (or zero-letter?) variable names? Written in a dead programming language that should be dead, but your client is still using it for some God-awful reason? The list goes on...so spew!
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
At the least the code written for the Obfustacted Perl Contest was intentionally awful. Here's an example :-
@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2)+=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;printLooks more like a dump of compiled code than source...
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Okay, last day or so ago, I asked what your favorite programming job was. Now, what is the worst, nastiest, ugliest source code you ever saw and what made it so horribly bad? Not commented (heh heh yeah, as if) or one-letter (or zero-letter?) variable names? Written in a dead programming language that should be dead, but your client is still using it for some God-awful reason? The list goes on...so spew!
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
I was hired to port a case management system for intellectual properties (patents, trademarks, etc) to Java/EE. It was written in Power Basic (Sybase 3.5 GL language) by someone who learned programming in C64 basic. I have not seen such clutter before in my life. I found huge blocks of code that literally could've been removed, countless dependencies on global variables, ugly SQL (they often stored their queries in the database - WTF?). Such a mess. I still have nightmares. On several occasions, my design decisions were overridden by their management. One case involved user role management. I proposed the standard role/object/model that is well understood. They agreed, but refused to understand basic set theory. An empty set of access rights would mean "all access to everything" according to them. I responded that is a bad idea, and makes security administration overly complex, and potentially insecure. They would not understand (even after countless of negative use cases). I implemented their stupid ideas. Later on they did not want to pay for my work on the role management, because "it was implemented badly". WTF? They said I did not implement it according to their specifications. Guess what? The "specifications" was my original design! I told them I don't do business with liars, and we went to court. I got half in a settlement. If I had wanted 100% of what they owed, the case would've taken at least one more year. I don't want to spend time in court, I want to create, so I grabbed the 50% and vowed to myself not to fall into that trap again. I was screwed royally on that gig. Code wise and business wise. I have also encountered code for an installer driver that was spaghetti in several dimensions. Structure wise, and thread wise! The code had bugs that the original authors could not track down in 6 months. I spent two weeks with a colleague trying to track it down. I just gave up and kept bugging the management until I was approved to ditch the code, and rewrite it. It turned out that another division in the company had written a really good installer driver, so the story had a good ending!
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
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For me, Worst code I see everyday is Catch block with no statements
// ♫ 99 little bugs in the code, // 99 bugs in the code // We fix a bug, compile it again // 101 little bugs in the code ♫
I think they are excellent. They weed out the pros from the wannabes. Just fire the wannabes, and hire new people. Continue until all empty catch blocks are gone!
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
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Probably the VB.net I had to work on last year... but there was also the this C code I wrote back in '94...
#define begin {
#define end }
#define then /**/
#define mod %
#define and &&
#define or ||:-O
I think I know what your first programming language is... :-D
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
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Okay, last day or so ago, I asked what your favorite programming job was. Now, what is the worst, nastiest, ugliest source code you ever saw and what made it so horribly bad? Not commented (heh heh yeah, as if) or one-letter (or zero-letter?) variable names? Written in a dead programming language that should be dead, but your client is still using it for some God-awful reason? The list goes on...so spew!
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
When I first started my current job, I was hired as a contractor to help the guy currently on the project. Talking to him, he sounded fairly sharp, if a little vague at times. After I found something that looked like this:
#define ENDCAS1 case 23: \
DoThing();\
break;\
case 36:\
DoThing2();\
break;\
default:\
DoThing3();\switch (operation)
{
case 1:
DoThis();
break;
case 14:
DoThat();
ENDCAS1
}in his code, I knew better.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Okay, last day or so ago, I asked what your favorite programming job was. Now, what is the worst, nastiest, ugliest source code you ever saw and what made it so horribly bad? Not commented (heh heh yeah, as if) or one-letter (or zero-letter?) variable names? Written in a dead programming language that should be dead, but your client is still using it for some God-awful reason? The list goes on...so spew!
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
Code that forced Oracle tables to behave like ISAM files
Ger
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For me, Worst code I see everyday is Catch block with no statements
// ♫ 99 little bugs in the code, // 99 bugs in the code // We fix a bug, compile it again // 101 little bugs in the code ♫
Oh, yeah, on the assignment I just started there are lots of those... :sigh: One in particular is around an access to a Dictionary -- in case the key doesn't exist I guess. Personally, I'd check with ContainsKey, but not the guy who wrote this.
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I think I know what your first programming language is... :-D
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
The second time I took a course in C, the textbook was "C as a Second Language, For Native Speakers of Pascal", I still have it right here. (But BASICplus was my first programming language.)
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"The data was imported daily from SAP" But wait... I thought SAP did everything. Aren't all of those annoying little side-apps with their interface and import requirements supposed to just go away after a successful SAP implementation? And shouldn't costly, difficult-to-manage programmers be a thing of the past? Or was I misled on these points?
SAP requires costly, difficult-to-manage programmers be available in very large numbers so that one may be sacrificed daily to appease the beast! The same thing goes for Oracle ERP too!
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Code that forced Oracle tables to behave like ISAM files
Ger
Oracle was implemented on IBM mainframes using VSAM! ;P
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Okay, last day or so ago, I asked what your favorite programming job was. Now, what is the worst, nastiest, ugliest source code you ever saw and what made it so horribly bad? Not commented (heh heh yeah, as if) or one-letter (or zero-letter?) variable names? Written in a dead programming language that should be dead, but your client is still using it for some God-awful reason? The list goes on...so spew!
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
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Okay, last day or so ago, I asked what your favorite programming job was. Now, what is the worst, nastiest, ugliest source code you ever saw and what made it so horribly bad? Not commented (heh heh yeah, as if) or one-letter (or zero-letter?) variable names? Written in a dead programming language that should be dead, but your client is still using it for some God-awful reason? The list goes on...so spew!
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
A MS Access app(lol) that a accountant wrote over some years. It looked a excel documents and another access database all over the network using mapped drives. It produced a huge excel document that all the executives used every day. Oh and the excel documents were created by our own programs which we had full access to the database so I have yet to understand why this was created.
