Terrible coding examples

D.P.

D.P.

D.P.

Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
32,625
We recently got some software from a partner to take over nd fix up. they were in charge of writing it but it kept crashing and seemed to have endless problems. It is is full of beautiful gems like this:


Code: 
 public UInt64 shift(int i)
                {
                        if (i ==0)
                                return (1 << 0);
                        else if (i == 1)
                                return (1 << 1);
                        else if (i == 2)
                                return (1 << 2);
                        else if (i == 3)
                                return (1 << 3);
                        else if (i == 4)
                                return (1 << 4);
                        else if (i == 5)
                                return (1 << 5);
                        else if (i == 6)
                                return (1 << 6);
                        else if (i == 7)
                                return (1 << 7);
                        else if (i == 8)
                                return (1 << 8);
                        else if (i == 9)
                                return (1 << 9);
                        else if (i == 10)
                                return (1 << 10);
                        else if (i == 11)
                                return (1 << 11);
                        else if (i == 12)
                                return (1 << 12);
                        else if (i == 13)
                                return (1 << 13);
                        else if (i == 14)
                                return (1 << 14);
                        else if (i == 15)
                                return (1 << 15);
                        else if (i == 16)
                                return (1 << 16);

                        return 0;
                }


not that its broken, but why, just why!


Any examples of madness you have seen?
 
Don't have examples to hand but seen some nasty instances of hard coded features and 1000s of line of if statements in a row similarly redundant as your example. (Have a browse of the Kingpin source code sometime heh).

I wish I still had the bubble sort routine my lecturer was using as an example, I recoded it into 1/3rd the number of lines and 10x the performance and after that just pretty much gave up on his classes.
 
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The main application my team has to support is rife with examples of how not to do things.

Code: 
If 1 = 0 Then
Draft()
End If

Why not just comment it out???

Code: 
Catch ex As Exception
' value-added-ish feature, so don't worry about exceptions
End Try

Exceptions are just swallowed all over the place like this. (I can't find an example right now, but exceptions are also regularly used for flow control).

Code: 
Select Case LCase(variable)
Case "something"
Return "ABC"
Case Else
Return "ABC"
End Select

In a similar vein, we also have a few instances along the lines of

Code: 
If something Then
DoSomething()
Else
DoSomething()
End If
 
It depends how open your company is to refactoring code. There are places where once you finish a "feature" / "bug fix" and get it tested and signed off, management are reluctant to go back in and refactor even though you have some nasty code that will most likely cause you loads of trouble down the line.

I need to find a new job ...
 
My favourite is short but silly:

Code: 
return count(foo) == 0 ? true : false;

or

Code: 
if (count(foo) == 0) {
   return true;
}
else {
   return false;
}

What an absolute waste of space!
 
smyth said:
It depends how open your company is to refactoring code. There are places where once you finish a "feature" / "bug fix" and get it tested and signed off, management are reluctant to go back in and refactor even though you have some nasty code that will most likely cause you loads of trouble down the line.

I need to find a new job ...
Click to expand...

With us it is more of a question of time, if code works then we wont sped time refactoring it because there will be some over fire to fight and deadline looming. It is a start-up so we are always struggling to finish work as it is, e.g. last week I got given an emergency task to help a customer Thursday at 5pm that had to be working on Monday 8am. So our code is often not fantastic but, there is no excuse for terrible programming like I put in the OP. Why would you even thing of doing it that way, and where on that list of IF statements would you realize the stupidity, and once it was all done why would you not just delete and start again to avoid the embarrassment?

It is not only that it is wasteful and slow, there is a good chance if making an error somewhere in that block and you shift by the wrong value and never notice it without staring at the code.
 
Tom B said:
My favourite is short but silly:

Code: 
return count(foo) == 0 ? true : false;

or

Code: 
if (count(foo) == 0) {
   return true;
}
else {
   return false;
}

What an absolute waste of space!
Click to expand...


Almost forgivable but completely pointless.
I've seen far worse though!

Code: 
class  Foo {
  bool stupid;
  ...
}


class Bar {
  Foo foo; 
  ...
  bool isStupid() {
     if (foo.stupid == true) {
         return true;
      } else {
        return false;  
     }
}

Bows my mind people can code like that and still have a job!
 
D.P. said:
With us it is more of a question of time, if code works then we wont sped time refactoring it because there will be some over fire to fight and deadline looming. It is a start-up so we are always struggling to finish work as it is, e.g. last week I got given an emergency task to help a customer Thursday at 5pm that had to be working on Monday 8am. So our code is often not fantastic but, there is no excuse for terrible programming like I put in the OP. Why would you even thing of doing it that way, and where on that list of IF statements would you realize the stupidity, and once it was all done why would you not just delete and start again to avoid the embarrassment?

It is not only that it is wasteful and slow, there is a good chance if making an error somewhere in that block and you shift by the wrong value and never notice it without staring at the code.
Click to expand...
That is a complete synonym with what you have quoted, only you are on the side of the management in his post.
 
D.P. said:
With us it is more of a question of time, if code works then we wont sped time refactoring it because there will be some over fire to fight and deadline looming. It is a start-up so we are always struggling to finish work as it is, e.g. last week I got given an emergency task to help a customer Thursday at 5pm that had to be working on Monday 8am. So our code is often not fantastic but, there is no excuse for terrible programming like I put in the OP. Why would you even thing of doing it that way, and where on that list of IF statements would you realize the stupidity, and once it was all done why would you not just delete and start again to avoid the embarrassment?

It is not only that it is wasteful and slow, there is a good chance if making an error somewhere in that block and you shift by the wrong value and never notice it without staring at the code.
Click to expand...

I guess code reviews (if your company does them) should easily filter out this sort of code.
 
smyth said:
I guess code reviews (if your company does them) should easily filter out this sort of code.
Click to expand...

We don't hire people that code like that in the first place!


Just to be clear, the code blunder in my OP was from a customer. Their program sucked and kept failing, they would blame us and got us to restart the crashed server endlessly. In the end we said we would just recode their software for them if we are going to be responsible for uptime.

What is very scary is these people are responsible for most of the city/council software needs relating to transportation, and this is in a very big city
 
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