What was the most interesting, funny or silly Code you have ever read?

[Patrick Fox]

It wasn't funny at the time, but any VB.Net code that looked like this is hilarious in retrospect:

try

' lots of statements

catch
end try

Or even worse:

On Error Resume Next

' lots of statements

The developer's excuse? "My code doesn't crash!" Yeah. It also didn't work.

[Ronald A]

it could be a 'typo' for an Or :)

[Phil_Murray]

This one has it beat.

[Patrick Fox]

That's downright scary. I insist that people use C# so they don't get into bad habits like that.

[SeattleC]

Zac Greve wrote:

//WTF just happened?!?!! Environment.Exit(-1);

Way back in the 1980's, I was using Sun 3 workstations running UNIX. We had FrameMaker, back before Adobe got ahold of it. On UNIX, there is a command called "strings" that attempts to extract all the ASCII strings from a file. If you ran it over FrameMaker.exe, one of the strings you got was... "Evacuate now? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances." There is no way to tell what error case causes this message to print, or just what happens right after, but I really want to know.

[Member 8414600]

in FORTH: Begin ... if ( swap ) ... until then The parentheses allow you to leave the compiler, so the swap changes the addresses on the stack so the straddled begin and if statements worked.

[ForestHymn]

This is going back many years, and from memory it went something like this:

- (bool)is_even(int value)
{
if (value == 0)
{
return true;
}
else if (value == 2)
{
return true;
}
else if (value == 4)
{
return true;
}
...
else if (value == 12)
{
return true;
}

return false;

}

And so it went to 12 and I guess for the context in which it was used it apparently was a high enough number. You could of course replace this method using a simple modulus operation. What's also funny is that I saw this code in a printout on the wall of an engineer, which had been there for a couple years. A short time after, another engineer, new to the group, found this method still existing in another part of the code base (apparently just copy-pasted from its original location). The code base was very large. Lesson learned is if you find bad code somewhere do a global search to insure it is not duplicated anywhere else.

[Mike Marynowski]

Hahaha, level: advanced, and spent all day on it. So many levels of humor in that article...mind blown.

[Brisingr Aerowing]

This wasn't my code, it was from one of my friend's projects. I cannot remember what the actual class did, but most of the projects code files were naive (and buggy) implementations of classes in the framework. I did show him the documentation, and his reply was "Cool! How did you know this existed?". Me: :doh:

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image. Stephen Hawking

[Sentenryu]

PEBKAC :-\

I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)

[Brisingr Aerowing]

I think it was more of an ID-Ten-T error. Either that or a BrainNotFoundException. He has decided to become an English Major with Anthropology and History minors. :doh:

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image. Stephen Hawking

[Yann Bane]

Which language is that? Java?

[Jagsir]

int main (){
long variable = -1;

    long var24 = 24;
    unsigned long var26 = 26;

    if( variable < var24 && (variable > var26)){
            printf("%ld, is a magic number, %lu, %ld, %ld", variable, variable, var24, var26);
    }
    return 0;

}

I was just wondering if this could come up somewhere in the code and still be funny. -JD

[sappo]

this following jQuery nugget:

if ( $('#'+src.id).parent().parent().next().children().children('.dvSpeakerBio').is(":visible") )
{
$('#'+src.id).parent().parent().next().hide();
$('#'+src.id).parent().parent().next().children().children('.dvSpeakerBio').hide();
$('.speaker').removeClass('selectedSpeaker');
$('.alt_speaker').css('background-color', '#f6f6f6');
}

[Member 4608898]

I've seen that in older Fortran programs on compilers for systems that didn't have comparison against constants in their assembly language. They saved zero in a particular location and all comparisons were done against that location. Occasionally, someone would unknowingly pass 0 into a routine in the parameter position where the value was changed by the routine. That is when zero stopped becoming zero and was something completely different. It read something like if ((0+1) .ne. 1) call abend

[User 8545351]

Haha I am sure i have read this in a book or programming tutorial as an example for bad code.

[Sentenryu]

:doh: well, can't say i haven't found such cases... there was a guy on my class who left to become a surgeon... I hope I never have to be operated by him :~

I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)

[Sentenryu]

:~

I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)

[Clark Kent123]

That was my thoughts exactly. However, there are many other instances like the example I posted. The worse I have seen are many goto statements.

[dxk241]

I have seen that code in a VB6 app and it was a convenient way to get an empty but initialized (containing columns you were interested in) RecordSet from the database that you could then populate with data and save.