This code review gave me eye cancer.

So, first of all, let me apologize to anyone impacted by eye cancer, if that really is a thing... because that sounds absolutely horrible. But, believe me, this code was absolutely horrible, too.

I was asked to code review another team's script. I don't like reviewing code from other teams, as I'm pretty "intense" and a nit-picker -- my own team knows and expects this, but I tend to really piss off other people who don't expect my level of input on "what I really think" about their code...

So, I get this script to review. It's over 200 lines of bash (so right away, it's fair game for a boilerplate "this should be re-written in python" or similar reply)... but I dive in to see what they sent.

My eyes.

My eyes.

MY EYES.

So, I certainly cannot violate IP rules and post any of the actual code here (be thankful - be very thankful), but let me just say, I think it may be the worst code I've ever seen. And I've been coding and code-reviewing for upwards of 30 years now. And I've seen a LOT of bad code...

I imagine the author of this script was a rebellious teenager who found the google shell scripting style guide and screamed "YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD!" at it and then set out to flagrantly violate every single rule and suggestion in the most dramatic ways possible.

Then they found every other style guide they could, and violated all THOSE rules, too. Just because they were there.

Within the same script... within the SAME CODE BLOCK... 2-space indentation... 4-space indentation... 8-space indentation... TAB indentation... and (just to be complete) NO indentation (entire blocks of code within another function of conditional block, all left-justified, no indentation at all).

lowercase variable/function names, UPPERCASE names, underscore_separated_names, CamelCase names, and every permutation of those as well.

Comments? Not a single one to be found, aside from a 4-line stanza at the top, containing a brief description of that the script did and (to their shame), the name of the author. There were, however, ENTIRE BLOCKS of code commented out.

[ In the examples below, I've replaced indentation spacing with '-', as I couldn't get devrant to format the indentation in a way to suitably share my pain otherwise... ]

Within just a few lines of one another, functions defined as...

function somefunction {
----stuff
}

Another_Function() {
------------stuff
}

There were conditionals blocks in various forms, indentation be damned...

if [ ... ]; then
--stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
--then
----some_stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
then
----something
something_else
--another_thing
fi

And brilliantly un-reachable code blocks, like:

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]; then
--SOME_VAR="blah"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
----then
----SOME_VAR="foo"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
--then
--echo "SOME_VAR must be set"
fi

Do you remember the classic "demo" programs people used to distribute (like back in the 90s) -- where the program had no real purpose other than to demonstrate various graphics, just for the sake of demonstrating graphics techniques? Or some of those really bad photo slideshows, were the person making the slideshow used EVERY transition possible (slide, wipe, cross-fade, shapes, spins, on and on)? All just for the sake of "showing off" what they could do with the software? I honestly felt like I was looking at some kind of perverse shell-script demo, where the author was trying to use every possible style or obscure syntax possible, just to do it.

But this was PRODUCTION CODE.

There was absolutely no consistency, even within 1-2 adjacent lines. There is no way to maintain this. It's nearly impossible even understand what it's trying to do. It was just pure insanity. Lines and lines of insanity.

I picture the author of this code as some sort of hybrid hipster-artist-goth-mental-patient, chain-smoking clove cigarettes in their office, flinging their own poo at their monitor, frothing at the mouth and screaming "I CODE MY TRUTH! THIS CODE IS MY ART! IT WILL NOT CONFORM TO YOUR WORLDLY STANDARDS!"

I gave up after the first 100 lines.

Gave up.

I washed my eyes out with bleach.

Then I contacted my HR hotline to see if our medical insurance covers eye cancer.

Code review:

- Almond: This method here is a mix of convoluted loops conditionals and ternaries... I really don't think we can pass this. Can we make sure this logic is a lot clearer?
- Bob: Oh, ok, sure. I'll work on that.

Next day:

- Bob: I've hopefully cleared up the meaning of that code now.
- Almond: Sure, let me look. Err... it looks the same to me? Have you done it in another branch?
- Bob: Oh no, it is the same, but there's a link in the code now to a PNG of a flowchart I put together in draw.io to show how it works.

...🤦‍♂️

This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.

Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.

The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.

Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)

It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.

Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:

The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.

This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."

Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.

------

Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.

This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.

I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.

I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.

My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.

It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.

Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛

Should I be excited or concerned?

Newbie dev(babydev) who just learned string vs int and the word "boolean", is SUPER into data parsing, extrapolation and recursion... without knowing what any of those terms.

2 ½ hrs later. still nothing... assuming he was confused, I set up a 'quick' call...near 3 hrs later I think he got that it was only meant so I could see if/where he didnt understand... not dive into building extensive data arch... hopefully.

So, we need some basic af PHP forms for some public-provided input into a mySQL db. I figured I'd have him look up mySQL variables/fields, teach him a bit about proper db/field setup and give him something to practice on his currently untouched linux container I just set up so he could have a static ipv4 and cli on our new block (yea... he's spoiled, but has no clue).

I asked him to list some traits of X that he thinks could be relevant. Then to essentially briefly explain the logic to deciding/returning the values/how to store in the db... essentially basic conditionals and for loops... which is also quite new to him.

I love databases; I know I'm not in the majority... I assumed he'd get a couple traits in his mind and exhaust himself breaking them down. I was wrong. He was/likely is in his sleep now, over complicating something that was just meant as a basic af.

Fyi, the company is currently weighted towards more autistics (him and myself included) than neurotypicals.

I know I was(still am) extremely abnormal, especially when it comes to things like data.

So, should I be concerned/have him focus elsewhere for a bit?... I dont want to have him burnout before he even gets to installing mySQL

How are Coding Bootcamps and what are they like?

A little background:

I’ve been going to a University (have a year left for a CS degree) and I am so EXTREMELY frustrated. I thought I would get an education but it’s so underwhelming. 95% of it doesn’t involve programming and the classes that do are so elementary that I know more than the professors. By the end of my web design course we had been taught to center text, insert images, insert links, and how to use tables with a single day on CSS using colors.
The OOP courses are all the same, learn variables, types, conditionals, loops, classes, functions, and so forth. Python, C++, and Java. I taught all this to myself when I was 15, I’m 29 now.

I’ve recently gotten extremely interested into full stack web development. .NET Core, React, Typescript. I’m also working with Electron. I’m basically 100% self taught and spend almost every waking moment trying to learn more and apply it.

There’s only one person at my school who has the same passion as me and he’s the president at the coding club but is going into machine learning and big data (I’m the Secretary) and I just wish I could interact with more people who have the same passion. I would love to be challenged. I feel as if I spend more time trying to learn and diagnose problems then applying my knowledge because web development is so complicated when it comes to connecting everything together and I’m still relatively new to it (started like 4 months ago). I’m an extremely fast learner and extremely dedicated so I’m not worried about that being an issue.

I just really want to be a part of a community where I have people who can answer my questions and I don’t have to spend hours or days on google finding a solution to integrating Webpack or using typescript with react, and more. I want to feel challenged.

Can I get this from a boot camp? I recently listened to a podcast from Syntax and it really excited me but I don’t want to be let down again. Either way I’m finishing my degree to get that bullshit $60000 piece of paper but I wouldn’t mind taking a couple months off for something like this if it’s worth it.

I live in CO so if you have any Bootcamps in CO that you recommend, I’d love to hear it and take a trip to check it out in person.

Thanks a bunch!

According to people here, ternary operators. I don't care what I'm doing, if I can use a ternary operator instead of an if, get ready for it!
I guess implicit brackets on conditionals and for loops if it's a single line. Anything that saves me typing boilerplate, but it's still readable, I'm gonna do it.

Disclaimer - Day in the life of a whitehat student.

Whitehat Whitehat Whitehat

What is this????
When I attended my first white hat jr online free trial class, I got to know that the teachers does not know the difference between java and javascript. Infact they were saying blockly as javascript. I was knowing the difference between the same. There were 3 types of courses -

***Note : - This information is taken from the whitehat official website***

1.) Introduction to Coding :-

Sequence, Fundamentals Coding Blocks, Loops
(Teach us to drag and drop blocks of code.org(blockly))

2.) App Developer Certificate:-

Events / UI,Conditionals, Complex Loop, Logic Structures, Turtle Coding
(Advanced drag and drop(blockly))

3.) Advance Coding with Space Tech -

Extended UI/UX, Rich GUI app, Space Tech simulation in Space Lab / Game Lab, Professional Game Design.
(GUI - with tkinter(python), Game Design - Blockly(code.org))

These things are rubbish ......making GUI's is simplest with tkinter and the students who make games (with code.org) submit their codes to the whitehat community (because the teacher says "they will compile it to an android app, then you can publish it to playstore" --- this is for 1% students who are able to design their own games).

The thing whitehat do with code given by 1% best students:-

Export to HTML from code.org
Download HTML to APK Convertor
Setup SDK
Successfully converted to APK!
Publish it to Whitehat Jr console account
Credits of the students
Income of the exporters

Rest all students will only think to be the CEO of google one day.

My Opinion - StackOverflow, Unity for Game Development, Android Studio, Dart, Flutter and Kivy (using google colab for compiling the python code to an apk) for app development and Flask, HTML, CSS for web development.

Apparently they knew how to program in bible (partial translation of a traditional passover song below):

If He had brought us out from Egypt,
and had not carried out judgments against them
— Dayenu, it would have sufficed!
If He had carried out judgments against them,
and not against their idols
— Dayenu, it would have sufficed!
If He had destroyed their idols,
and had not smitten their first-born
— Dayenu, it would have sufficed!
If He had smitten their first-born,
and had not given us their wealth
— Dayenu, it would have sufficed!
If He had given us their wealth,
and had not split the sea for us
— Dayenu, it would have sufficed!
If He had split the sea for us,
and had not taken us through it on dry land
— Dayenu, it would have sufficed!

Is there a fucking boundary of what is artificial intelligence and what isn't? People literally shove a few conditionals in a function and call it AI...
By that criteria everything is an AI

So first rant, here goes weirdness, and also lengthy rant

So in my company we have the hr and accounting managed by the same person which also deals with all things employee related and she had a need for a way to extract a birthday from, what is in our country the personal identification number, things go great i get a formula that performs parts of the magic up to the point where the first digit of the number dictates the gender and century to be used when forming the full year, mind you only the last two digits of the year are in plain within the id number so i thy a number of ideas. After bashing around google sheets for a while ( i've got open office installed and formulas don't export well to the excel that person uses but google sheets does so i built it there).

First idea : make a few conditionals to check for the value so we have 1 and 2 for 19th century, 3 and 4 for 18th century , 5 and 6 for 20th so i go ahead and write my conditions and they fail, all evaluates to false, it cascades through the else variants up to the last one so i'm wondering if the "if" itself doesn't support the or operator, seems it does, next i think it's the bloody condition written wrong so i reevaluate my logic in php in a test script, it works as intended, then i think ok not the right function called, let's see the docs, docs confirm i'm doing it right but what was wrong was the way i was getting that first number, using left seems to produce a string although the base thing is a number, now i start searching how i can cast it, like you would normaly do when the data type is fried, value function appears to be the solution but it isn't working....now i'm thinking "ok so i have a value and different things to print out so let's look for a switch, maybe it can understand that" switch function found under the form of choice, i get it sorted but am stuck wondering why the heck was the if and value combination not working.

Simple answer to that : value doesn't work well with function results, a known bug listed by someone in a comment, a comment i have failed to read for about 45 minutes of trying to understand.

All in all it worked well for the person asking for it so it's nice.

Don’t fall for the “language A is better than language B” -it’s all just syntax (within the same paradigm). Learn higher concepts such as: data structures, abstraction, loops, variables, conditionals, functions.

Only then can you decide that your favourite language is better than anyone else’s...

So we map conditionals based on the form labels that the client can change and don't autoupdate them.

Javascript really needs a way to define consts for a block 1 level up.

So instead of

const el = wide ? els.wide : els.tall

You can do

if (wide) const el = els.wide
if (!els) const el = els.tall

// etc..

Just makes chaining and backup values way easier than inline conditionals 🤔

Why don't we change all conditionals from if to as long as?

as long as true:

as long as false:

Is it not beautiful?

At some point I need to do an older project i've had on hold a while, but it'd require writing my own ROM patch system as a major step in completing it, as i'd need to dynamically patch stuff into older games based on system, which current patch formats don't allow for. (This project will also help me learn a few things I need for yet more projects I've got stashed away, so it needs to happen eventually.)

Now, the interesting part: the patch format. I was debating on whether to use binary data, like IPS/BPS and similar formats do, which would be easier to implement... but if I were to have plaintext patches, you'd be able to not only understand what's happening, but also have things like scripting and conditionals and user-defined options and such. This would be WAY harder to implement, slow as fuck, and require an assembler per-target-system, either external or internal... but it'd be transparent, editable, and hella extendable.

This would all happen after I'm both over my burnout AND done chewing through my current stack of projects and such, of course, but still... which sounds better to you, dear reader?

When you're having to add BS/hackey conditionals to your code because the other dev is too damn lazy to fix their code.

Back when I still was in my first internship and was still working my way through the fundamentals of programming, I given a web relay and asked to make it do something. The web relay let you write BASIC into a web page hosted by the device itself in order to program it. My task was to turn the relay on if a certain temperature threshold was met, and to turn off the relay (the relay would control an air intake system for cooling).

I learned the syntax of BASIC enough to get a basic (hah) script going, and dug into the relay documentation for other bits of info I needed. It definitely was no coding masterpiece, but I was able to program the damned thing to turn this blower on and off if the measured temperature was within a range. I discovered that there was a limit to how deep the conditionals would nest, and had to restructure my code to account for the limitation.

I've since gotten better at coding, but to accomplish that task as I was beginning my programming journey felt like a true accomplishment.

What's the general Software Engineering rule of thumb again for frontend templating code?

If I look at certain websites, I notice some code smells in PHP such as:
$.modal = <?php echo $(base)["username"] != 'me' ?' ': echo 'style="display=none"' ?>

or just in general places in the code where PHP gets used as a templating engine for gluing together pieces of HTML code based on conditionals spread out over the codebase and the database itself too. To make things worse, this carries over to JavaScript ajax functions. As a developer, this to me just seems like spaghetticode.

On the other hand, many popular frameworks properly do templating, such as EJS, containing templating in one place and not mixing it with logic too much but just having simple output like <%= %>.

I know I've seen frameworks like Angular 1 contain pieces of HTML into directives, but maybe that's something different, more 'OO'-simulating or cleaner.

rant.author != this

Christ people. This is just sh*t.

The conflict I get is due to stupid new gcc header file crap. But what
makes me upset is that the crap is for completely bogus reasons.

This is the old code in net/ipv6/ip6_output.c:

mtu -= hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr);

and this is the new "improved" code that uses fancy stuff that wants
magical built-in compiler support and has silly wrapper functions for
when it doesn't exist:

if (overflow_usub(mtu, hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr), &mtu) ||
mtu <= 7)
goto fail_toobig;

and anybody who thinks that the above is

(a) legible
(b) efficient (even with the magical compiler support)
(c) particularly safe

is just incompetent and out to lunch.

The above code is sh*t, and it generates shit code. It looks bad, and
there's no reason for it.

The code could *easily* have been done with just a single and
understandable conditional, and the compiler would actually have
generated better code, and the code would look better and more
understandable. Why is this not

if (mtu < hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr) + 8)
goto fail_toobig;
mtu -= hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr);

which is the same number of lines, doesn't use crazy helper functions
that nobody knows what they do, and is much more obvious what it
actually does.

I guarantee that the second more obvious version is easier to read and
understand. Does anybody really want to dispute this?

Really. Give me *one* reason why it was written in that idiotic way
with two different conditionals, and a shiny new nonstandard function
that wants particular compiler support to generate even half-way sane
code, and even then generates worse code? A shiny function that we
have never ever needed anywhere else, and that is just
compiler-masturbation.

And yes, you still could have overflow issues if the whole "hlen +
xyz" expression overflows, but quite frankly, the "overflow_usub()"
code had that too. So if you worry about that, then you damn well
didn't do the right thing to begin with.

So I really see no reason for this kind of complete idiotic crap.

Tell me why. Because I'm not pulling this kind of completely insane
stuff that generates conflicts at rc7 time, and that seems to have
absolutely no reason for being anm idiotic unreadable mess.

The code seems *designed* to use that new "overflow_usub()" code. It
seems to be an excuse to use that function.

And it's a f*cking bad excuse for that braindamage.

I'm sorry, but we don't add idiotic new interfaces like this for
idiotic new code like that.

Yes, yes, if this had stayed inside the network layer I would never
have noticed. But since I *did* notice, I really don't want to pull
this. In fact, I want to make it clear to *everybody* that code like
this is completely unacceptable. Anybody who thinks that code like
this is "safe" and "secure" because it uses fancy overflow detection
functions is so far out to lunch that it's not even funny. All this
kind of crap does is to make the code a unreadable mess with code that
no sane person will ever really understand what it actually does.

Get rid of it. And I don't *ever* want to see that shit again.

Nested conditionals in scheme 😤😭😫