Mark's team needed someone to write a pretty straight-forward report for their Python application. It would take a set of keyword arguments, turn those into a filter, apply the filter, and get the results back.

This was implemented in two methods. First:

The time and effort needed to complete a project and the amount of time available rarely line up well. Wayne M's company found themselves in a position where what they needed to deliver and what they could deliver by the deadline simply didn't match up.

The requirements were well specified, so they bundled up a bunch of requirements for search-related functionality, and handed them off to a self-described "world class" developer working on contract.

Once upon a time, someone wanted to add a banner to a web page. They also wanted the banner to only appear after a certain date. Jack stumbled across their implementation when trying to understand why the banner would vanish for two weeks at the start of every month.

// get date
var MyDate = new Date();
var MyDateString;

MyDate.setDate(MyDate.getDate());

MyDateString = ('0' + MyDate.getDate()).slice(-2) + '-' + ('0' + (MyDate.getMonth()+1)).slice(-2) + '-' + MyDate.getFullYear();

if (MyDateString > '13-04-2014') {
    // do stuff...
}

Behind every code WTF is a process WTF. For example, Charles W was recently tasked with updating some file-handling code to match changes in the underlying file-format it parses. This is the C code which parses an integer:

		if ((*p == '-' || ('0' <= *p && '9' >= *p)) && retCode == -256)
		{
			retCode = 0;
			p = _tcsrev(p);
			if (*p == ' ')
				p++;
			for (i = 0; '0' <= *p && '9' >= *p; i++)
			{
				retCode += (int)pow(10, (double)i) * ((int)*p - 0x30);
				p++;
			}
			if (*p == '-')
				retCode *= -1;
		}

A few years back, Alvin was in college, and took his first formal summer job as a programmer. It was supposed to be just some HTML layout work, and the designer handed him a few sample pages. "Just do it like this."

The "sample pages" were a mishmash of random indentation, huge swathes of commented out code, and all those other little traits of "someone's just coding in production, aren't they?" that crop up in files. Still, it was just some HTML layout work, so how hard could it be?

Operator overloading is one of those "dangerous" features. Like multi-parent inheritance, it can potentially create some really expressive, easy to read code, or it can create a disaster of incomprehensible nonsense.

In C++, many core classes use operator overloading, most notably the I/O classes, which reuse (or abuse) the bitshift operators into stream operators. So, for example, one possible way of converting a string into an integer might be to do something like this: