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

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«‹›1503 »

comedyblissoption: Mar 15, 2006

Treating enums as integral values means some rear end in a top hat is going to do cutesy integer arithmetic on it or that you'll have to consider cases where you get an integral value that doesn't map to the assigned enum integral values.

Treating bools as integral values means you'll accidentally coerce numerical values into a bool and vice versa and cause a bunch of cool bugs and make reading code harder. People will also constantly forget that negative integral values exist and what they should coerce to.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 06:21

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# ? May 17, 2024 15:04

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

TheresaJayne posted:

i can't stand emacs,

The best editor i ever saw was an old DOS editor called edit.exe amazing then and todays editors are not even close.

and in linux if i haven't got vi i will not use the system.

pre:

When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi
*and* Emacs are just too drat slow.  They print useless messages like,
'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'.  So I use the editor
that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.

Ed, man!  !man ed

ED(1)               UNIX Programmer's Manual                ED(1)

NAME
     ed - text editor

SYNOPSIS
     ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
     Ed is the standard text editor.
---

Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first
alphabetically, but because it's the standard.  Everyone else loves ed
because it's ED!

"Ed is the standard text editor."

And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair.  Just look:

-rwxr-xr-x  1 root          24 Oct 29  1929 /bin/ed
-rwxr-xr-t  4 root     1310720 Jan  1  1970 /usr/ucb/vi
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  5.89824e37 Oct 22  1990 /usr/bin/emacs

Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed.
Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog
message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!

"Ed is the standard text editor."

Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:

golem> ed

?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello? 
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?

---
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage.  Ed is
generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm
the novice with verbosity.

"Ed is the standard text editor."

Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.

ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA!  ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED
AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES!  ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS
BODILY FLUIDS!!  ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR!  ED MAKES THE SUN
SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!

When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless
help screens and cursor positioning code!  I just want an EDitor!!
Not a "viitor".  Not a "emacsitor".  Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED!
ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!

TEXT EDITOR.

When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their
"edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi?  No.  Emacs?  Surely
you jest.  They chose the most karmic editor of all.  The standard.

Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on.  If you
are an idiot, you should use Emacs.  If you are an Emacs, you should
not be vi.  If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION.  THE
SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE
FAITHLESS.  DO NOT GIVE IN!!!  THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!

?

# ? Oct 23, 2015 06:28

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

comedyblissoption posted:

Treating enums as integral values means some rear end in a top hat is going to do cutesy integer arithmetic on it or that you'll have to consider cases where you get an integral value that doesn't map to the assigned enum integral values.

Or worse, you could be working with someone who thinks flag enums are really cool and not an abomination :commissar:

# ? Oct 23, 2015 08:18

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

ok, i'll bite: what's wrong with flag enums?

# ? Oct 23, 2015 09:06

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

Harik posted:

A few different horrors at work - first, the meticulous comment documentation for a magic hex number instead of spending that time turning it into #defines
0x21 should be RATE_A(0)|RATE_B(RB_50HZ)|MODE_NORMAL|ACTIVE; which documents the intent AND isn't fragile as poo poo.

Why would you turn it into a #define rather than a const variable?

# ? Oct 23, 2015 09:36

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

Suspicious Dish posted:

ok, i'll bite: what's wrong with flag enums?

If you're not at the optimisation level where you care about saving bits - you aren't, especially if we're talking about c# - then a struct of bools is better and safer in every single way. It explicitly states its nature and its functioning, it's impossible to define it or operate on it in a broken way, its usage is far more readable, and it's trivial to extend it when necessary (for example, if one of the flags needs to allow for a third value).

Flag enums are a clever efficiency hack, which are the three most damning words I know to describe a programming construct.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 12:51

csammis: Aug 26, 2003; Mental Institution

Hammerite posted:

Why would you turn it into a #define rather than a const variable?

In C, const means read-only but not constant - it could be modeling a value in memory which does change, so subsequent reads could return different values. You just can't write to it. Since it's just a variable you still get all the normal variable things like storage allocation. #define is the way to form constant literal values.

e: unless you want to use C enums but since we're at the moment arguing about how int-enums are literally Satan it seems in poor taste :v:

csammis fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Oct 23, 2015

# ? Oct 23, 2015 13:36

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

NihilCredo posted:

If you ever use C# in something like a manufacturing fixture configuring a device EEPROMs, or reading various wire formats, and so on you will find it's often more sensible to work with data in situ packed however the guy on the "other end of the line" packed it rather than unpacking/serializing it, working on it and then repacking/deserializing it. In these cases boolean flags packed into integer types and bitfields and whatnot are something you just have to deal with, and enums are C#'s cleanest way to deal with them. (If you decide to serialize/deserialize it doesn't get around this problem, of course, it just means you get to do it twice instead of once).

# ? Oct 23, 2015 13:56

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Suspicious Dish posted:

ok, i'll bite: what's wrong with flag enums?

I'll let the SA forums user table columns 'useroptions', 'useroptions2', and 'useroptions3' field that one

# ? Oct 23, 2015 14:12

Subjunctive: Sep 12, 2006; ✨sparkle and shine✨

Building flags out of something with unknown width makes me uncomfortable too, for some reason.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 14:51

comedyblissoption: Mar 15, 2006

Blotto Skorzany posted:

If you ever use C# in something like a manufacturing fixture configuring a device EEPROMs, or reading various wire formats, and so on you will find it's often more sensible to work with data in situ packed however the guy on the "other end of the line" packed it rather than unpacking/serializing it, working on it and then repacking/deserializing it. In these cases boolean flags packed into integer types and bitfields and whatnot are something you just have to deal with, and enums are C#'s cleanest way to deal with them. (If you decide to serialize/deserialize it doesn't get around this problem, of course, it just means you get to do it twice instead of once).

In a sanelang this should be represented by operations on bitfields and defined integral constants, because this is literally what the data and operations are. Someone could probably write a standard library API for this specific purpose.

Enumerations for extracting bits are not any cleaner than the above and give you essentially nothing. The only thing C-like enumerations buy you is being able to leverage familiarity with C-isms.

Restricting enumerations to not be any arbitrary integer is a much more useful property than familiarity with C-idioms. Hell, it could even make the act of extracting bits into enums safer, because now the enums are guaranteed to make sense instead of be allowed to be any arbitrary integer.

comedyblissoption fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Oct 23, 2015

# ? Oct 23, 2015 15:15

comedyblissoption: Mar 15, 2006

The library would probably do things like let you give it a map between enums and integral constants. The one disadvantage of this approach is the language designers will probably not guarantee the correctness of your map statically and the library author will dynamically verify the correctness of your map.

This allows you to have C-like bitfields while preserving the sanity of what enumerations really should be. It could be argued that enumerations really want to be sum types and what we really need is algebraic data types, though.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 15:24

SupSuper: Apr 8, 2009; At the Heart of the city is an Alien horror, so vile and so powerful that not even death can claim it.

comedyblissoption posted:

In a sanelang this should be represented by operations on bitfields and defined integral constants, because this is literally what the data and operations are. Someone could probably write a standard library API for this specific purpose.

Enumerations for extracting bits are not any cleaner than the above and give you essentially nothing. The only thing C-like enumerations buy you is being able to leverage familiarity with C-isms.

Restricting enumerations to not be any arbitrary integer is a much more useful property than familiarity with C-idioms. Hell, it could even make the act of extracting bits into enums safer, because now the enums are guaranteed to make sense instead of be allowed to be any arbitrary integer.

C# does have Flags helpers but they're not enforced.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 15:48

Marta Velasquez: Mar 9, 2013; Good thing I was feeling suicidal this morning...; Fallen Rib

Dessert Rose posted:

so, on april fools, emacs users can actually use emacs?

That should have been ==

I typed it from memory. I couldn't remember if I did "!= ||" or "== &&" and I conflated the two.

Marta Velasquez fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Oct 23, 2015

# ? Oct 23, 2015 16:55

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

NihilCredo posted:

If you're not at the optimisation level where you care about saving bits - you aren't, especially if we're talking about c# - then a struct of bools is better and safer in every single way. It explicitly states its nature and its functioning, it's impossible to define it or operate on it in a broken way, its usage is far more readable, and it's trivial to extend it when necessary (for example, if one of the flags needs to allow for a third value).

Flag enums are a clever efficiency hack, which are the three most damning words I know to describe a programming construct.

I mostly write C code, where the alternative is:

C++ code:

SomeGoddamnedWin32API(hWND, NULL, NULL, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, FALSE, TRUE);

I'd much prefer:

C++ code:

SomeGoddamnedWin32APIEx(hWND, NULL, NULL, FLG_OVERWRITE | FLG_VERBOSE | FLG_OVERLAP);

# ? Oct 23, 2015 17:23

Karate Bastard: Jul 31, 2007; Soiled Meat

I like gedit.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 17:24

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

Also, you would probably hate me for writing code that looks like this in java script:

JavaScript code:

    var Operation = {
        //                 B21
        UNION:     0x7, // 111
        INTERSECT: 0x4, // 100
        SUBTRACT:  0x1, // 001
        XOR:       0x3, // 011
    };
    var OperationComponents = {
        IN_1: 0x1,
        IN_2: 0x2,
        IN_BOTH: 0x4,
    };

And then testing the flags. And then later on using ^= and a bunch of other bitwise twiddling. But it's graphics code, it comes with the space. And I tried to comment it well: https://github.com/magcius/xplain/blob/gh-pages/src/region.js

# ? Oct 23, 2015 17:29

necrotic: Aug 2, 2005; I owe my brother big time for this!

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

When you get right down to it, no matter how you represent it it's going to have some consistent integer value underneath, even if you go to pains for it to be inaccessible.

Even ruby gets this right (they are not integers at any point):

"The global value true is the only instance of class TrueClass and represents a logically true value in boolean expressions. The class provides operators allowing true to be used in logical expressions."

# ? Oct 23, 2015 17:41

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

Suspicious Dish posted:

I mostly write C code, where the alternative is:
C++ code:
SomeGoddamnedWin32API(hWND, NULL, NULL, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, FALSE, TRUE);
I'd much prefer:
C++ code:
SomeGoddamnedWin32APIEx(hWND, NULL, NULL, FLG_OVERWRITE | FLG_VERBOSE | FLG_OVERLAP);

c99 supremacy?

C++ code:

SomeGoddamnedWin32APIEx(hWND, NULL, NULL, {.overwrite = true, .verbose = true, .overlap = true});

The struct members can even be bitfields for the same efficiency as the flags.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 18:03

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

I thought you had to do:

thing(foo, bar, (struct options) { ... });

I didn't think it worked without the cast there, because the compound literal syntax includes the cast. Maybe it's a gcc extension?

# ? Oct 23, 2015 18:09

Greatbacon: Apr 9, 2012; by Pragmatica

I'm doing a code review on some SQL statements and there were some legacy statements that had a static final constant named COMMA instead of just ", " and it is ugly as gently caress to read. I'm glad this programmer refactored them while he was in there.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 18:25

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

Suspicious Dish posted:

I didn't think it worked without the cast there, because the compound literal syntax includes the cast. Maybe it's a gcc extension?

Objective-C++ thing, actually. It's a combination of c99 designated initializers and c++11 list initialization.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 18:36

lord of the files: Sep 4, 2012

so there was some legacy code written in 2004 when everyone thought that a string deserved to be a static constant. the company's dynamic sql building code used to be a nightmare. each word had its own string and that was chained together with a ton of string concatenation. no prepared statements, just plain text and apostrophes.

lord of the files fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Oct 23, 2015

# ? Oct 23, 2015 18:46

rjmccall: Sep 7, 2007; no worries friend; Fun Shoe

Using bit-fields instead of flag masks is conceptually nicer and definitely gives you prettier code, but (1) they don't always perform as well for subtle reasons, even on modern compilers, and (2) please please please do not use them as part of a binary serialization format.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 19:05

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

I recently was looking through a debug dump of the onboard nonvolatile memory of a product that I worked on a couple of years ago. When I picked the format for it, I mostly picked constants for uninitialized fields that would stand out in a hex dump:

And that's all well and good. However, this was a very frustrating project to work on for a number of reasons, and at one point I really doubted whether people were even reading the specs for various subsystems that I was sending them and asking them to review and check for errors. So when I got to the end of the hex dump, I was reminded of one of the ways I checked whether anybody bothered to read things:

It brought warmth to my heart. I am the horror.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 19:17

sarehu: Apr 20, 2007; (call/cc call/cc)

Blotto Skorzany posted:

I recently was looking through a debug dump of the onboard nonvolatile memory of a product that I worked on a couple of years ago. When I picked the format for it, I mostly picked constants for uninitialized fields that would stand out in a hex dump:

And that's all well and good. However, this was a very frustrating project to work on for a number of reasons, and at one point I really doubted whether people were even reading the specs for various subsystems that I was sending them and asking them to review and check for errors. So when I got to the end of the hex dump, I was reminded of one of the ways I checked whether anybody bothered to read things:

It brought warmth to my heart. I am the horror.

Why are all the fives circled?

# ? Oct 23, 2015 19:20

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

As usual for enum-related things, Java gets it more right than most mainstream languages: an EnumSet is strongly typed and behaves like a set, not an integer, but internally it can use bit flags to keep things efficient too.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 19:23

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

sarehu posted:

Why are all the fives circled?

Hexplorer's default font

# ? Oct 23, 2015 19:35

ChickenWing: Jul 22, 2010

Managers are going to be piloting a new bit of software called HP Agile Manager as a potential replacement for JIRA. Anyone have insight into whether this will be good/bad/horrible for all involved?

# ? Oct 23, 2015 20:46

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

It's from HP and has Agile in the same, so pretty safe to assume it's horrible.

# ? Oct 23, 2015 20:47

ChickenWing: Jul 22, 2010

Plorkyeran posted:

It's from HP and has Agile in the same, so pretty safe to assume it's horrible.

That was my first thought

I fear that people here are secretly, unironically using the term "agilefall" in planning meetings

# ? Oct 23, 2015 21:03

I would blow Dane Cook: Dec 26, 2008

ChickenWing posted:

That was my first thought

I fear that people here are secretly, unironically using the term "agilefall" in planning meetings

wagile

# ? Oct 24, 2015 00:56

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

ChickenWing posted:

Managers are going to be piloting a new bit of software called HP Agile Manager as a potential replacement for JIRA. Anyone have insight into whether this will be good/bad/horrible for all involved?

It's actual triple word score because of "manager" which is about as descriptive as "program" in terms of telling what something does.

HP is like the least "Agile" company in the history of the world - it is a really big offender in the "writing software that no one in their right mind would buy" category of enterprise software (e.g. QTP.) Having HP write agile tools is like inviting Hitler to be a rabbi at a bar mitsvah.

# ? Oct 24, 2015 13:59

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

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

which is about as descriptive as "program" in terms of telling what something does.

Um, it's a spell that appeases the machine spirits? I thought we were all programmers here.

# ? Oct 24, 2015 17:28

Spectral Elvis: Jul 23, 2007

Munkeymon posted:

Basically I'm wondering what we'd have to deal with if the entire computing revolution came from the Arabic-speaking world. I'm guessing there'd be an ASCII-alike where some character range was supposed to print one way and some the other and software was just expected to deal with it. Oh and since this is an alternate reality where IBM is based in Qatar, everyone has to deal with this encoding as the foundation of Unicode, including the implicit direction changes. Also porn filters have become strong AI.

This reminds me of a real life standards horror - ASMO 449 (thankfully superseded by ASMO 449+). Somebody had the genius idea of trying to fit both Arabic and Latin characters into a 7-bit encoding, in such a way that the arabic characters superimpose over the ASCII latin character space. The general idea is that by default a text string is displayed as arabic, with the exception of sequences delimited by '[' and '}' which would be interpreted as latin.

I had the pleasure of being introduced to this when visiting a potential customer in Egypt back in the early 2000s. The system comprised several million lines of code, and gigabytes worth of pre-existing database data. They wanted to modernize, which meant converting it all to ASMO 708 at the very least. Unfortunately a lot of the meta-characters were broken over multiple strings (both in the code and in the database), so there was no viable means of automating the conversion.

# ? Oct 25, 2015 12:46

Linear Zoetrope: Nov 28, 2011; A hero must cook

No indentation has been lost in the following code block:

code:

for (int i = 0; i < tokens.size(); i++) {
	String[] sentence_tokens=tokens.get(i);
	for(int j=0; j<sentence_tokens.length;j++)
	fw.write(sentence_tokens[j]+"\n");
	fw.write("\n");
}

# ? Oct 26, 2015 10:50

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

porkfactor posted:

This reminds me of a real life standards horror - ASMO 449 (thankfully superseded by ASMO 449+). Somebody had the genius idea of trying to fit both Arabic and Latin characters into a 7-bit encoding, in such a way that the arabic characters superimpose over the ASCII latin character space. The general idea is that by default a text string is displayed as arabic, with the exception of sequences delimited by '[' and '}' which would be interpreted as latin.

I had the pleasure of being introduced to this when visiting a potential customer in Egypt back in the early 2000s. The system comprised several million lines of code, and gigabytes worth of pre-existing database data. They wanted to modernize, which meant converting it all to ASMO 708 at the very least. Unfortunately a lot of the meta-characters were broken over multiple strings (both in the code and in the database), so there was no viable means of automating the conversion.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about :allears:

# ? Oct 26, 2015 15:23

loinburger: Jul 10, 2004; Sweet Sauce Jones

My program is using a persistent ActiveMQ JMS queue:

1. Item (a batch job) is enqueued in ActiveMQ
2. ActiveMQ saves the item to disk
3. Eventually we take the item out of the queue and process it, using a JMS transaction (so the item is flagged so that nobody else can take it from the queue, but it's still on disk)
4. If nothing goes wrong then we commit the JMS transaction and delete the item from the queue/disk, if the server crashes in the meantime then the item will still be on the queue when the server restarts

My co-worker wants to "optimize" this
1. Item is enqueued in ActiveMQ using a JMS transaction; we don't commit this transaction
2. Eventually we take the item out of the queue and process it using the same JMS transaction that we used to enqueue the item
3. If nothing goes wrong then we commit the JMS transaction which doesn't make any changes to the queue, if the server crashes in the meantime then the item is gone forever because we never committed the transaction that sends the item to ActiveMQ

This way everything runs faster because we're not doing disk IO! He insists that this will still behave like a persistent queue (I'm trying to convince him that this is wrong) - I'm not sure how we can have a persistent queue without doing disk IO, but there you go.

# ? Oct 26, 2015 15:35

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

It's ActiveMQ I don't think performance is high on your priority list already?

# ? Oct 26, 2015 16:18

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# ? May 17, 2024 15:04

loinburger: Jul 10, 2004; Sweet Sauce Jones

Nope, queueing accounts for a piddly fraction of execution time - the whole point of using a JMS queue is for persistence / fault tolerance, otherwise I'd be using a ConcurrentLinkedQueue.

# ? Oct 26, 2015 16:20

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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