I’ll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.

  1. They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.

  2. The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.

  3. This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.

  4. Here’s my favorite part. You obviously don’t want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you’re thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.

  • dimeslime@lemmy.ca
    3·
    5 hours ago

    My current favorite is in ruby with the unless keyword:

    tax = 0.00
unless not_taxed(billing)
  tax = billing.zipcode.blank? ? estimated_tax_from_ip(account) : billing.tax
  tax = (tax.nil? ? 0.00 : tax)
end

    To me, anything payments related you want to be really super clear as to what you’re doing because the consequences of getting it wrong are your income. Instead we have this abomination of a double negative, several turnaries, and no comments.

    • luciferofastora@feddit.org
      1·
      5 hours ago

      FYI, an operator with three arguments (such as ?:) is called ternary. The word is related to tertiary, if that helps remembering it.

      • dimeslime@lemmy.ca
        3·
        5 hours ago

        Correct, and since there are multiple instances I’m using a plural form, and fighting autocorrect at the same time.

        • luciferofastora@feddit.org
          2·
          4 hours ago

          I know you were using multiple instances, but I wasn’t sure if that was a typo, auto cow wrecked or genuinely not knowing.