null vs undefined

I just ate in Undefined

IF LIVES DEPEND ON A SYSTEM

1. Code review, collaboration, and knowledge sharing (each hour of code review saves 33 hours of maintenance)

2. TDD (40% — 80% reduction in production bug density)

3. Daily continuous integration (large code merges are a major source of bugs)

4. Minimize developer interruptions (an interrupted task takes twice as long and contains twice as many defects)

5. Linting (catches many typo and undefined variable bugs that static types could catch, as well as a host of stylistic issues that correlate with bug creation, such as accidentally assigning when you meant to compare)

6. Reduce complexity & improve modularity  -- complex code is harder to understand, test, and maintain

-Eric Elliott

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"

Use profanity labelled variables... like the $penis I just used in my code... (makes coding fun, until u get "undefined variable: cannot find $penis on line 31")

Error: undefined variable "social"

A customer was complaining that the twitter feed on their homepage was listing strange tweets containing curses. somehow a JavaScript variable was not assigned correctly and got a value of 'undefined'. because @undefined is an existing twitter handle the code did not crash and went on displaying the wrong tweets.

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

Shamless rant towards the shamless Cursey dude. 😫

So whole day I have been trying to pass a variable from laravel blade view to vue2 component file. All in seperate files. I know that I have successfully passed 1 or 0 in same flow before. So I was following the same steps to pass my string variable. It kept giving me undefined. No google helped and I had been doing all kinds of stupid useless trials. All failed.

Because it is supposed to fail. 😐
I only learned it at the end of the day.

HEY!
JAVASCRIPT!
I wasted 3 hours on your this. self. null, undefined, + asynch functions, bullshit "features"...

AGAIN...

and your taking 8 seconds to compile and test each wild guess that I make until I finally console.log every single fucking variable in order to make sense of it all

so, as usual, FUCK YOU

> Am writing code
> Life is good
> Add debugger keyword
> Script pauses
> Type in var name... Undefined.
> ...What?
> Check out local scope. It's there. What the fuck?
> Add console.log(myVariable)
> Refresh
> Logs variable no problem. Cool.
> Type in my var name
> Undefined

FFFUUUUUUU-

God I hate JavaScript.

Why on earth would some variable * somthing.other (where somthing is undefined) result in 653957364??????

Node: The most passive aggressive language I've had the displeasure of programming in.

Reference an undefined variable in a module? Prepare to waste your time hunting for it, because the runtime won't tell you about it until you reference a property or method on the quietly undefined module object.

Think you know how promises work? As a hiring manager, I've found that less than 5% of otherwise well-experienced devs are out of the Dunning Kruger danger zone.

Async causes edge cases and extra dev effort that add to the effort required to make a quality product.

Got a bug in one of your modules? Prepare yourself for some downtime because a single misplaced parentheses can take out the entire Node process, killing unrelated pages and even static file hosting.

All this makes for a programming experience that demands much higher cognitive load, creates more categories of bugs, and leads to code bloat/smell much more quickly than other commonly substituted languages.

From a business perspective, the money you save on scaling (assuming your app is more compute efficient under Node) is wasted on salaries and opportunity costs stemming from longer dev time, more QA, and more frequent outages.

IMO, Node is an awesome experiment, a fun language, a great tool for specific use cases, and a terrible fucking choice for an entire website.

Speaking of JS gotchas. Why is there a null and undefined? I guess undefined doesn't exist, but null is it exists, but is null? Had a bug related to this. I was checking for null, but undefined was getting in there even though I defined the variable as null beforehand. All I can guess is some assignment shoved undefined in there. But that just doesn't make sense to me. So an existing variable can be undefined as well? lol

I am glad this is not my primary language for heavy lifting. Fuck this noise.

I was going to do this as a rant. But it turned into an ironic joke. I am adding an old meme, but it checks out for accuracy.

I don't know why I'm doing this but when I go to websites that aren't mine and found that there's a bug in their site or system, I kinda happily report these bugs and issues to their email with screenshots, findings and steps to reproduce the bug.

Just recently, I just went to a site and found a peculiar timeout error, eventhough it was less than a second to respond back. Only to find that there was an undefined JavaScript variable in their code.

Is there a bug bounty for fixing code?

Prefer if(typeof variable != "undefined") over if(variable)

Thinking how the fuck did the variable became undefined and realizing you defined the variable in an asynchronous rest call...

A TypeScript boolean/undefined Flag variable kept fucking up
true == true didnt hold true

checked the "typeof" in console and it's GOODDAMN STRING.
What's the point of TypeScript's "type safety" if a Boolean variable is holding a String type for whatever reason. URGHH I HATE JAVASCRIPT.

Focused on debugging Javascript after being asked for help. Original developer narrowed it down to an if statement. It was acting like the if statement was assigning the variable and causing undefined. Tested console.log before evaluation. Tried !== instead of != and same thing. Even swapped undefined and variable so it would try to assign a variable named undefined instead... It took way too long for the both of us to realize the word "let" in front of the variable on the line withing the if statement block... It overwrite the variable the moment it entered the block.... FML.

mov al, [var]

var db 07h

Error on line 1: undefined operation size.

Silly me defining a byte, using mov on a byte-wide register with said byte-wide variable. What size it could be, the byte-wide variable is soo fucken unknown i'm so sorry.

So at the HS I go to, there are 4~5 programmers (only 3 real "experienced" ones though including me).

So coming from JS & Python, I hate Java (especially for robotics) and prefer C++ (through some basic tutorials).

Programmer Nº2 is great at everything, loves Objective-C, Swift, Python, and to a certain extent Java.

Programmer Nº3 loves Python and used to do lots of C#, dislikes Java and appreciates Go (not much experience).

So naturally I get shit on (playfully) because of my JS background, because they don't understand many aspects of it. They hate the DOM manipulation (which is dislike too tbh), but especially OOP in JS, string/int manipulation, certain methods and HOISTING.

So, IDK if Java or C++ (super limited in them) have hoisting, but if you don't know what hoisting is, it means that you can define a variable, use it before assigning a value, and the code will still run. It also means that you can use a variable before defining it and assigning a value to it.

So in JS you can define a variable, assign no value to it, use it in a function for instance, and then assign a value after calling the function, like so:

var y;
function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");

output: undefined bob

And, as said before, you can use a variable before defining it - without causing any errors.
Since I can barely express myself, here is an example:
JS code:

function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
var y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");

output: undefined bob

So my friends are like: WTF?? Doesn't that produce an Error of some sort?
- Well no kiddo, it might not make sense to you, and you can trash talk JS and its architecture all you want, but this somehow, sometimes IS useful.

No real point/punchline to this story, but it makes me laugh (internally), and since I really want to say it and my family is shit with computers, I posted it here.

I know many of you hate JS BTW, so I'm prepared to get trashed/downvoted back to the Earth's crust like a StackOverflow question.

Me: I found the problem. The function call is being given a reference to an undefined variable as an argument. The quotes around that argument were accidentally omitted; it's supposed to be a string.

A "Senior" Developer: No, that wouldn't cause it break.

Me: 😐

Spend the whole day trying to figure out why that API call returns undefined...
Whitespace character after the variable

Roses are red
I'm gonna cry
"can't read function 1 of undefined"

when your trying to use someone else code, but they have it very unoptimized, so you fix it up, only to refresh your editor to see Type-error hell and the editor tells you to fuck off by not telling you what line it's on...

I mean what the fuck man. Why do editors do this shit. They don't clear their caches sometimes, so you don't know if a type-error occurs, so your just FUCKED and you have to start all over. I've spent 5 hours just trying to edit one fucking program so I can import it into mine. The code itself is just fine, but the amount of sloppy variables is good damn outrages, I legit have to leave non-critical variables or else the program just breaks, even though those variables aren't even being fucking used for the purpose I have the program for anyways. And I can't just leave the code as it is because it would cause to much of a performance drop in a program that involves music. Like I would let that happen. The worse part is, is that I got so close one time, it was almost done, no type-errors, 2 hours in, I get a little excited and delete some more useless code without checking for type errors. Well guess I'll go fuck myself. Oh? I can't seem to find the most likely most useless unrelated variable? Shucks, oh boy, oh gee. Fuck off with this shit, I didn't start learning JavaScript only to be fisted in the ass if I want to use code from someone else program. Literally it would be so much better if the editor could tell me where this error is, but noooooooooooooooo, it's literally an internal error and that means I can go fuck myself two ways to Sunday

Typescript is my new favorite and my grudge is the stupid scoping of type assertions. I have an async function that checks whether a variable is set and awaits a change event if it's undefined. This function is working javascript but invalid according to typescript, because it relies on the exact type changing while the function is running. I had to convert it to a mess of promises to bypass this because (and this is the best) the callback-based syntax of identical meaning will reset all type assertions, even locals that are never written after the callback's creation.

NodeJS and MongoDB. And tutorials.

Everywhere tutorials show simple example of console.log output of findOne. Good, that works... But when I try to extrapolate example to assign results to variable, it won't work. Inside that fetch anonymous function it works... But outside, simply undefined no matter what I try. Return doesn't return either...

Why it is so hard to make tutorials and examples that would be actually useful. I've spent hours with this already.

And on top of that it is really hard to find tutorials staying with minimum extra dependencies. Like most tutorials in this case throw mongoose in the soup. And I don't want that.

Sometimes makes me question why I try to learn these new things, when I have knowledge of other technologies that I could use faster and easier...

Dear frontend dev,

if you can't check whether a variable is defined or not, why do i have to change the back end to accept urlparam='undefined' as valid and replace it with your default value in my backend? Why are you afraid of 40X's? You should be interested in the bugs of your code.

It feels awful to have a middleware in place catching all errors and replacing them with empty 200 responses 😭. All of this because you don't fucking ensure your variables exist before use.

So, I have a problem I'm working with mongoose in nodejs and I want to make a dynamic query like I have 2 fields gender and type of room and these are optionals so what I did I wrote an if condition that if gender is not undefined a variable which is q += "gender:" + " ' " + gender + " ' " + ","; and when I pass this variable in find() it doesn't work but if i write the same query directly there in find() it works what seems to be the problem?

My understand of null

0,empty = values explicitly set
Null = variable exists but it's still virgin.
Undefined = variable doesnot exists

So im about to finish a mean stack bootcamp in 2 weeks. Im working on my final project and its nothing too fancy im just doing a simple inventory app (i have future plans for it to bundle it into an entire suite for a specific subset of retail). So i take my live coding exam and fork it (simple app with crud finished) and im trying to add an edit feature that populates tge fields with the prior data. Spent the whole of yesterday working on it from 12a-midnight. Just this one feature to bring previous values into an edit page. Seems simple enough. But it wasnt working right. So im looking all over posted on SO even got a friend of mine thats been programming for 20 years to help me and we cant figure out why it thinks a variable is undefined when it clearly has a value dorectly before the save method fires. (Console.logged that shit)

At about midnight i realize its because i needed to write a router.put in the api because i was just using the regular save originally :/