The Weird and The Wonderful

The Weird and The Wonderful forum is a place to post Coding Horrors, Worst Practices, and the occasional flash of brilliance.

We all come across code that simply boggles the mind. Lazy kludges, embarrassing mistakes, horrid workarounds and developers just not quite getting it. And then somedays we come across - or write - the truly sublime.

Post your Best, your worst, and your most interesting. But please - no programming questions . This forum is purely for amusement and discussions on code snippets. All actual programming questions will be removed.

Re: This is a really neat website for converting file formats

honey the codewitch6-Jun-21 4:39

honey the codewitch

6-Jun-21 4:39

I always post tools in the wrong section

*headdesk*

sorry.

Real programmers use butterflies

Re: This is a really neat website for converting file formats

Ron Anders6-Jun-21 5:19

Ron Anders

6-Jun-21 5:19

Online converters are so cool.
You can seemingly convert anything to anything today. Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

modified 6-Jun-21 19:01pm.

Re: This is a really neat website for converting file formats

Greg Utas6-Jun-21 6:09

Greg Utas

6-Jun-21 6:09

Not quite. If those tools converted between C, C++, C#, Java, and Python, this site would be spared a lot of "Questions" that are nothing but code dumps asking for precisely that!

Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Re: This is a really neat website for converting file formats

Ron Anders6-Jun-21 12:39

Ron Anders

6-Jun-21 12:39

Quote:
Not quite. If those tools converted between C, C++, C#, Java, and Python, this site would be spared a lot of "Questions" that are nothing but code dumps asking for precisely that!

Get after it then.

Re: This is a really neat website for converting file formats

Richard Deeming6-Jun-21 21:53

Richard Deeming

6-Jun-21 21:53

Greg Utas wrote:
this site would be spared a lot of "Questions" that are nothing but code dumps asking for precisely that!

I admire your optimism! Laugh | :laugh:

Given the number of questions posted which could be answered by typing the question into Google and reading the first result, I doubt such a site would have any impact on the people who post the "convert this code for me" questions here.

Even if Chris managed to integrate the converter into the QA form, auto-detect questions about converting code, and automatically offer them the converted code, I suspect the questions would still get posted. After all, you can't expect them to have the time to actually read things on screen - they're far too busy trying to cheat on homework for a course they're not fit to pass. Smile | :)

"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer

Re: This is a really neat website for converting file formats

Mike Hankey19-Jun-21 6:23

Mike Hankey

19-Jun-21 6:23

Nice, thanks for the link.

The less you need, the more you have.

Why is there a "Highway to Hell" and only a "Stairway to Heaven"? A prediction of the expected traffic load?

JaxCoder.com

Re: This is a really neat website for converting file formats

honey the codewitch19-Jun-21 6:24

honey the codewitch

19-Jun-21 6:24

I totally put it in the wrong place tho. Again. *hangs head in shame*

Still, I'm glad you found it helpful. I use it all the time.

Real programmers use butterflies

A career first for me

Gary Wheeler5-Jun-21 4:56

Gary Wheeler

5-Jun-21 4:56

I have been working as a developer for a little over 40 years. In all that time, I have kept my comments clean. I am an avid user of curse words in my normal conversations, both verbal and online. It just always seemed unprofessional to use vulgar language in my code. Until today.

/***********************************************************
 * USELESS SHIT LEFT OVER FROM THE ORIGINAL IMPLEMENTATION *
 ***********************************************************/

I am now ~~saddled with~~ responsible for a piece of product code that is over 30 years old and still in active use. It's in C and started out on custom-built embedded hardware. Now it runs under Windows on an industrial PC. The original ~~creator of this pus-oozing bedsore~~ author of this stuff deliberately wrote it in a fashion that no one else could maintain it. He even cultivated a mythology about it, that it was dangerous for other people to even look at it, because it was so "performance-intensive". A few years ago he decided to retire rather than accept reassignment to another product. A succession of other people have taken it over, but no significant maintenance has been performed.

We now have a hardware obsolescence issue that requires a code change. I've spent well over 100 hours over the last month going through the code, finding all references to the bits that need replaced. Based on my study, only 4 out of the over 20 functions in the module really do anything with the hardware that's going obsolete. The rest are basically stubs and no-ops, but their return values are used to direct logic elsewhere. I have had to trace every single reference to the functions and the global values involved to ensure that it was safe to change things. I had to leave all these other bits in place because removing them would have wreaked havoc in other logic I don't want to touch.

After all this, it took me less than a day to write the new code.

Software Zen: delete this;