Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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zergstain: Dec 15, 2005

Carbon dioxide posted:

Looks like you can stop at sprint 7 and the client will be happier than with the presumably actually finished product from the waterfall model.

# ? Mar 5, 2016 17:31

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# ? Jun 2, 2024 09:22

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

M31 posted:

One of our national IT projects had in it it's specifications that dates should be in 'CCYY-MM-DD' format (century, year, month, day). Some genius decided that since 2000 is the 21st century that would mean that today would be '2116-03-05' and they would need lots of money to change this.

Which is why you should not do agile if you want to make a lot of money.

That's an impressive non-sequitor.

# ? Mar 5, 2016 18:04

Deep Dish Fuckfest: Sep 6, 2006; Advanced
Computer Touching; Toilet Rascal

M31 posted:

One of our national IT projects had in it it's specifications that dates should be in 'CCYY-MM-DD' format (century, year, month, day). Some genius decided that since 2000 is the 21st century that would mean that today would be '2116-03-05' and they would need lots of money to change this.

Huh. As far as bullshit date formats go, I have to admit that's one of the more exotic ones I've seen. I wonder if they're using the standard definition where the 21st century starts in 2001 and ends at the end of 2100, which means it'll go 2199 -> 2100 -> 2201?

# ? Mar 6, 2016 02:46

hackbunny: Jul 22, 2007; I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av

FamDav posted:

Whenever it's Unicode the answer is always old white men hate Asians.

Don't be daft. Han unification was a necessary evil to even get Unicode started in the first place

canis minor posted:

Are there any resources on this I can read explaining "why"? I'd have thought that even if a character set had Ⅻ as one singular character, translating it to Unicode should have become XII. If translating XII from Unicode to that character set, it would go back to Ⅻ, but I guess it's naive of me to think so (or I guess there's a roman sentence where IV should stay IV instead of Ⅳ)

I think Roman numerals were a case of Unicode people being a little too clever for their own good. You see, characters in Unicode can have a "numeric value" property, for characters where it makes sense to do so. Roman numerals have been assigned the way they are so that you don't need a parser to get their value, you just look them up in Unicode data and get their value from there, the idea being if you have a numeric input field, you could write 12 or you could write Ⅻ and get the same result (to prevent inputs like "12Ⅻ", some numeric characters - like 1 and 2 - are marked as digits and some others - like Ⅻ - aren't. So a valid input is either a string of digits, or a single character with a numeric value)

If you want a lossy conversion of lookalike characters into their base characters, you want to look into compatibility normalization forms, NFKC and NFKD

hackbunny fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Mar 6, 2016

# ? Mar 6, 2016 03:25

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS: Dec 21, 2010

hackbunny posted:

Don't be daft. Han unification was a necessary evil to even get Unicode started in the first place

They've blown past the limits at this point with emoji and crap anyway; why not add the variants? Seeing the wrong ones is annoying.

# ? Mar 6, 2016 07:47

Carbon dioxide: Oct 9, 2012

I heard something about there being a request to the Unicode Consortium about making the face emoji completely 'modifiable'. Different hair colors and styles, different eye colors, stuff like that.

Yeah, they're really going off the deep end with that.

# ? Mar 6, 2016 10:20

Hammerite: Mar 9, 2007; And you don't remember what I said here, either, but it was pompous and stupid.; Jade Ear Joe

Plorkyeran posted:

That's an impressive non-sequitor.

I think what M31 was trying to imply (and I might be wrong) is "the purchasers of the product were not aware of the described behaviour until they received the finished product, because it was not developed according to Agile methodology. Had it been developed using Agile methodology, the purchasers would have become aware of it during the development process and could have requested that it be changed. Thus the developers would have ended up making less money. So if you want to make lots of money (and you are ok with cynically exploiting your customers) you should not use Agile."

# ? Mar 6, 2016 11:19

Hammerite: Mar 9, 2007; And you don't remember what I said here, either, but it was pompous and stupid.; Jade Ear Joe

Carbon dioxide posted:

I heard something about there being a request to the Unicode Consortium about making the face emoji completely 'modifiable'. Different hair colors and styles, different eye colors, stuff like that.

Yeah, they're really going off the deep end with that.

U+XXXXXX EMOJI MODIFIER CHARACTER FOR EMO HAIRSTYLE
U+XXXXXX EMOJI MODIFIER CHARACTER FOR LIP RING
U+XXXXXX EMOJI MODIFIER CHARACTER FOR SULLEN FACIAL EXPRESSION

# ? Mar 6, 2016 11:23

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS: Dec 21, 2010

Carbon dioxide posted:

I heard something about there being a request to the Unicode Consortium about making the face emoji completely 'modifiable'. Different hair colors and styles, different eye colors, stuff like that.

Yeah, they're really going off the deep end with that.

Call me a fogey I guess, but it bothers me that I can text someone a pile of poop but not open a page in Japanese on my phone and see the right characters.

# ? Mar 6, 2016 20:37

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Users of non-latin character sets still really have a thing against using unicode. I wouldn't actually be too surprised if many 1� phones only support S-JIS.

MrMoo fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Mar 6, 2016

# ? Mar 6, 2016 20:57

pseudorandom name: May 6, 2007

I'm waiting for the brave Unicode implementation that makes U+1F346 AUBERGINE U+1F3FD EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-4 sequences do the needful.

# ? Mar 6, 2016 21:10

Soricidus: Oct 21, 2010; freedom-hating statist shill

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

Call me a fogey I guess, but it bothers me that I can text someone a pile of poop but not open a page in Japanese on my phone and see the right characters.

I guess the pages you're visiting aren't bothering to specify the language of the text? Or your phone isn't respecting that specification? Like, solutions exist, it's a shame Unicode isn't perfect but it's not like we haven't had decades to find workarounds.

There are also well-defined modifier sequences for specifying precise Han glyph variants when it actually matters. I don't think anyone bothers to use them, though.

# ? Mar 6, 2016 21:18

Hammerite: Mar 9, 2007; And you don't remember what I said here, either, but it was pompous and stupid.; Jade Ear Joe

pseudorandom name posted:

I'm waiting for the brave Unicode implementation that makes U+1F346 AUBERGINE U+1F3FD EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-4 sequences do the needful.

Ahahaha, there actually are EMOJI MODIFIER characters in unicode already, I thought I was making a joke :pwn:

# ? Mar 6, 2016 22:52

Zemyla: Aug 6, 2008; I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!

Malcolm XML posted:

pfft u need conjugate scrum to get REAL convergence

# ? Mar 6, 2016 22:58

ErIog: Jul 11, 2001

Soricidus posted:

I guess the pages you're visiting aren't bothering to specify the language of the text? Or your phone isn't respecting that specification? Like, solutions exist, it's a shame Unicode isn't perfect but it's not like we haven't had decades to find workarounds.

There are also well-defined modifier sequences for specifying precise Han glyph variants when it actually matters. I don't think anyone bothers to use them, though.

This happening on phones is usually a font issue caused by manufacturer oversight. CJK gets lumped together a lot, and companies who don't bother consulting with people in the markets they're trying to sell their phones in often end up not including enough fonts. They toss in a font, verify, "yup looks like moonspeak to me," and think their bases are covered without realizing the glyphs are wrong. It's gotten a bit better over time, though.

# ? Mar 7, 2016 02:17

KernelSlanders: May 27, 2013; Rogue operating systems on occasion spread lies and rumors about me.

M31 posted:

One of our national IT projects had in it it's specifications that dates should be in 'CCYY-MM-DD' format (century, year, month, day). Some genius decided that since 2000 is the 21st century that would mean that today would be '2116-03-05' and they would need lots of money to change this.

Which is why you should not do agile if you want to make a lot of money.

Conversely if you don't want to spend lots of money, you should never hire a multi-national consulting firm to write your software.

# ? Mar 7, 2016 04:33

qntm: Jun 17, 2009

Carbon dioxide posted:

I heard something about there being a request to the Unicode Consortium about making the face emoji completely 'modifiable'. Different hair colors and styles, different eye colors, stuff like that.

Yeah, they're really going off the deep end with that.

These new characters are apparently going through a completely ad-hoc fast-track process, not realising that there is no end to the list of emojis or modifiers people will ask for.

# ? Mar 7, 2016 18:09

Munkeymon: Aug 14, 2003; Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.

I really like how formally salty that guy is.

# ? Mar 7, 2016 20:42

Soricidus: Oct 21, 2010; freedom-hating statist shill

i followed a link from that article to public comments and boy some of these are great

quote:

The reference implementation for the Emoji Candidate 'THINKING FACE' features not only a face, but also a thought balloon. Existing implementations, such as the one in Gmail[1], do not feature such a balloon. Furthermore, the balloon is already encoded at U+1F4AD. The face should be separated from the balloon to allow for both use cases with and without balloon).

quote:

I am personally (not as a representative of any group) proposing the following concepts for emoji. All are drawn from the Lojban gismu list.

# ? Mar 8, 2016 01:04

pseudorandom name: May 6, 2007

I looked it up so you don't have to -- a gismu is a brivla that isn't derived or compounded. I hope that helps.

# ? Mar 8, 2016 01:58

JawnV6: Jul 4, 2004; So hot ...

Lojban has the best jokes.

# ? Mar 8, 2016 03:43

Pavlov: Oct 21, 2012; I've long been fascinated with how the alt-right develops elaborate and obscure dog whistles to try to communicate their meaning without having to say it out loud
Stepan Andreyevich Bandera being the most prominent example of that

I love conlangs but as far as I can tell lojban's only real shtick is it's very regular parsing rules.

# ? Mar 8, 2016 05:19

Munkeymon: Aug 14, 2003; Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.

Pavlov posted:

I love conlangs but as far as I can tell lojban's only real shtick is it's very regular parsing rules.

Yeah, IIRC, it's meant to be a formal language for people to use to communicate with each other. It's sort of a fork of a copyright-encumbered predecessor called Loglan.

# ? Mar 8, 2016 15:44

NihilCredo: Jun 6, 2011; iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt

From a discussion about whether it matters that Eclipse has ~1/10th the install size of Visual Studio:

quote:

I have a VM that has Eclipse installed and a "template" project. Every time I start a new project, I just clone the VM and spin up that new instance. Simple.

quote:

That feels super excessive to me...

quote:

It's simple, you should try it. Want to deploy to production? Give them the VM files, they start it up and hit 'play' in Eclipse and it "just works". Want to "branch out" a new version? Just clone the VM and go from there!

# ? Mar 8, 2016 22:18

TooMuchAbstraction: Oct 14, 2012; I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.; Fun Shoe

This sounds like someone trying to reinvent Python's virtualenv in the laziest way possible.

# ? Mar 8, 2016 22:25

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

NihilCredo posted:

From a discussion about whether it matters that Eclipse has ~1/10th the install size of Visual Studio:

wait, is he actually suggesting that their production server literally be running inside of eclipse inside of a vm? let me just take this high performance server and make it as slow as an arbitrarily old compaq presario.

# ? Mar 8, 2016 22:49

sunaurus: Feb 13, 2012; Oh great, another bookah.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

This sounds like someone trying to reinvent Python's virtualenv in the laziest way possible.

And they're using it for version control/branching? What the gently caress. Where is this discussion from?

# ? Mar 8, 2016 23:13

Deep Dish Fuckfest: Sep 6, 2006; Advanced
Computer Touching; Toilet Rascal

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

wait, is he actually suggesting that their production server literally be running inside of eclipse inside of a vm? let me just take this high performance server and make it as slow as an arbitrarily old compaq presario.

Worry not! With today's amazing modern web-scale cloud, you can just spin up as many VMs as you need! Problem solved.

Plus if whatever debugger eclipse uses allows for remote debugging, just leave a few ports open and in-production debugging has never been easier!

# ? Mar 8, 2016 23:20

qntm: Jun 17, 2009

NihilCredo posted:

From a discussion about whether it matters that Eclipse has ~1/10th the install size of Visual Studio:

Meanwhile, Docker

# ? Mar 8, 2016 23:27

HFX: Nov 29, 2004

NihilCredo posted:

From a discussion about whether it matters that Eclipse has ~1/10th the install size of Visual Studio:

I have had heard of some awful ideas, but I think this ranks up there in my top 5. The only way you could make this better is to tell me it was a systems architect.

# ? Mar 9, 2016 03:32

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

This vb6 code builds a string that gets sent to the server to be saved. Some of the fields that are packed into this string can contain plain English text. See if you can spot the problem:

Visual Basic .NET code:

Private Function AppendChangestring(ByRef Changestring As String, ByVal Key As String, Optional ByVal PieceNumber As Long, Optional ByVal ManyLineField As Boolean, Optional ByVal LineDelimiter As String) As Boolean
  Dim sTemp As String
  Dim sFieldValue As String
  Dim sReconstructString As String
  Dim sReconstructPiece As String
  Dim lPos As Long
  
  AppendChangestring = False
  On Error Resume Next
  With DataStore.DataKey(Key)
    sFieldValue = .GetLine(curLine)
    If ManyLineField Then
      If Not Len(LineDelimiter) > 0 Then
        LineDelimiter = Chr$(9)
      End If

      If Len(sFieldValue) > 0 And PieceNumber > 0 Then
        lPos = 1
        Do While lPos > 0
          sReconstructPiece = NextPiece$(sFieldValue, LineDelimiter, lPos)
          If Len(sReconstructPiece) > 0 Then
            If Len(sReconstructString) > 0 Then
              sReconstructString = sReconstructString & COMMA
            End If
            If Key = <SOME DATA KEY> Then
              sReconstructPiece = SOMEVALIDATIONFUNCTION(sReconstructPiece)
            End If
            sReconstructString = sReconstructString & Piece$(sReconstructPiece, vbLf, PieceNumber)
          End If
        Loop
        sFieldValue = sReconstructString
      End If
      sTemp = ONE & CH6 & COMMA
    Else
      If Len(sFieldValue) > 0 And PieceNumber > 0 Then
        sFieldValue = Piece$(sFieldValue, vbLf, PieceNumber)
      End If
      If Key = <SOME OTHER DATA KEY> Then
        sFieldValue = SOMEVALIDATIONFUNCTION(sFieldValue)
      End If
      sTemp = ""
    End If
    sTemp = sTemp & CH6 & sFieldValue & CH6
    Changestring = Changestring & Key & CH6 & sTemp
    AppendChangestring = True
  End With
  On Error GoTo 0
End Function

hint:think about what happens when a many line field contains text with commas in it

The guy who wrote this works at Microsoft now. If something feels really fucky and stupid, chances are if you hit ctrl+home his name will be at the top of the file.

# ? Mar 9, 2016 23:43

Knyteguy: Jul 6, 2005; YES to love
NO to shirts; Toilet Rascal

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

Visual Basic .NET code:

Private Function AppendChangestring(ByRef Changestring As String, ByVal Key As String, Optional ByVal PieceNumber As Long, Optional ByVal ManyLineField As Boolean, Optional ByVal LineDelimiter As String) As

the real horror

Visual Basic .NET code:

Private Function AppendChangestring(ByRef Changestring As String, 
    ByVal Key As String, 
    Optional ByVal PieceNumber As Long, 
    Optional ByVal ManyLineField As Boolean, 
    Optional ByVal LineDelimiter As String) As Boolean

Or a variant of to pretty it up even more. I'm pretty picky with styling though :arghfist:

. (Assuming that works since I use C#)

Knyteguy fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Mar 10, 2016

# ? Mar 10, 2016 01:56

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

no, in vb6 you can't just arbitrarily break lines. you can split a given line into, at most, 3 lines by putting a '_' character after a comma like so:

Visual Basic .NET code:

friend function poop(foo as variant, _
                                      bar as Collection, _
                                      butt as rear end)

End Function

VB6's IDE also has a habit of getting weird on you and crashing trying to do intellisense if you later edit a method signature that looks like that so people tend to avoid them unless the line is truly punishingly long.

# ? Mar 10, 2016 06:06

brap: Aug 23, 2004; Grimey Drawer

I knew that VB was finicky with line breaks, but god drat is it upsetting to have a language straight up forbid you from spacing out a long method signature in a readable way. gently caress VB.

# ? Mar 10, 2016 06:12

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

fleshweasel posted:

I knew that VB was finicky with line breaks, but god drat is it upsetting to have a language straight up forbid you from spacing out a long method signature in a readable way. gently caress VB.

keep in mind that vb6 is like nearly 2 decades old. i have no idea if vb.net has the same limitations. we're transitioning to c#.net + js for our frontend instead of trying to update to vb.net.

# ? Mar 10, 2016 06:23

Knyteguy: Jul 6, 2005; YES to love
NO to shirts; Toilet Rascal

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

no, in vb6 you can't just arbitrarily break lines. you can split a given line into, at most, 3 lines by putting a '_' character after a comma like so:
Visual Basic .NET code:
friend function poop(foo as variant, _
                                      bar as Collection, _
                                      butt as rear end)

End Function
VB6's IDE also has a habit of getting weird on you and crashing trying to do intellisense if you later edit a method signature that looks like that so people tend to avoid them unless the line is truly punishingly long.

Ouch; that must be a pain in the rear end to work with. I started out as a web designer, so stuff like this is something I've tried to adapt to writing code: http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability Though 100 chars is probably closer to what I do. I'd go nuts if I couldn't use a lot of white space.

Also I double checked, and that underscore after parameter commas is still in vb.net as of .net framework 4. Crazy. I thought it was just like C# with a different way of writing at this point.

Knyteguy fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Mar 10, 2016

# ? Mar 10, 2016 07:11

LOOK I AM A TURTLE: May 22, 2003; "I'm actually a tortoise."; Grimey Drawer

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

See if you can spot the problem:

I found multiple problems:

Visual Basic .NET code:

On Error Resume Next

Visual Basic .NET code:

On Error GoTo 0

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

vb6

# ? Mar 10, 2016 10:14

piratepilates: Mar 28, 2004; So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it.

LOOK I AM A TURTLE posted:

I found multiple problems:
Visual Basic .NET code:
On Error Resume Next
Visual Basic .NET code:
On Error GoTo 0

I'm getting flashbacks from working at a job where I had to fix broken VB6 code fast.

Please make it stop

# ? Mar 10, 2016 14:59

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

LOOK I AM A TURTLE posted:

I found multiple problems:
Visual Basic .NET code:
On Error Resume Next
Visual Basic .NET code:
On Error GoTo 0

theres so much of that poo poo all over the place im blind to it at this point :sigh:

# ? Mar 10, 2016 16:30

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# ? Jun 2, 2024 09:22

LOOK I AM A TURTLE: May 22, 2003; "I'm actually a tortoise."; Grimey Drawer

piratepilates posted:

I'm getting flashbacks from working at a job where I had to fix broken VB6 code fast.

Please make it stop

In my previous job I spent a lot of my time porting an old VB6 application to C#, so I almost never had to write VB6 myself but I did spend enough time reading and debugging it for one lifetime. The VB6 code actually had surprisingly decent error handling most of the time, but all the important subroutines were hundreds of lines long and the form classes were full of hairy logic.

Speaking of that previous job, here's an excellent method from that C# codebase that a former coworker just showed me:

C# code:

internal static bool IsThingDeletable(Thing thing)
{
    if (thing != null)
    {
        //
        int iCount = 0;
        return iCount == 0 ? true : false;
    }
    return false;
}

My favorite part is the empty comment.

# ? Mar 10, 2016 16:31

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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