The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Recent Representative Line

A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.

From a String Builder

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-02-19

Inheritance is one of those object-oriented concepts that creates a lot of conflicts. You'll hear people debating what constitutes an "is-a" versus a "has-a" relationship, you'll hear "favor composition over inheritance", you'll see languages adopt mix-in patterns which use inheritance to do composition. Used well, the feature can make your code cleaner to read and easier to maintain. Used poorly, it's a way to get your polymorphism with a side of spaghetti code.

Greg was working on a medical data application's front end. This representative line shows how they use inheritance:

17 comments - Last comment @ 2024-02-29

A Memory of Strings

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-02-13

As we saw yesterday, padding can be hard.

Jasmine received a set of tickets all complaining that the file download portion of an ASP .Net application took too long. Users frequently had to wait for up to 15 minutes before their browser finished downloading the output of the web application.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2024-02-16