I think this demonstrates nicely one of the common memes amongst the, shall we say, less reflective programmers out there - 'this is a simple problem, I can solve this easily myself' - the Bob paradox[1] in action. I think the thrill of being able to 'just get stuff done' can have a warping influence on a programmer which causes them to neglect to notice the details which makes the problem at hand a little more complicated than they imagine.
It's funny to see how they rationalise problems later as being entirely necessary to the problem (I've witnessed this first hand), and nothing to do with a misapprehension of the difficulty of the problem.
Am I the only one here who finds the dailywtf sometimes extremely depressing?!
Am I the only one here who finds the dailywtf sometimes extremely depressing?!
My feeling about DailyWTF is similar to visiting an art exhibition with paintings done by an unguided community class. The whole thing is clearly driven by a fundamental need to create something, and many of the exhibited works demonstrate an intoxicating thrill of getting something finished... But at the same time they make it clear why that thrill alone isn't a good enough reason for the work to be shown in public.
Am I the only one here who finds the dailywtf sometimes extremely depressing?!
Take the stories with a huge grain of salt. Many people have complained about their stories being hugely exaggerated before being published.
Alex Papadimoulis (the author of the website) has also admitted in an email that he often makes up new stories by embellishing old ones. The email used to be on the following link, but now you must ask the Programming Praxis author for a copy. http://programmingpraxis.com/2009/08/13/the-daily-wtf-malici...
I think of DailyWTF like I think of the modern newspaper and cable news - it's an unrepresentative sample of the population specifically selected for entertainment value, a more highbrow FailBlog.com if you will. At least in DailyWTF's case, it actually entertains.
That keeps me from getting too depressed when reading any of them.
This is the very first thing I thought of. The guy seems to have re-invented S-expressions in VB (or whatever ASP language that is). Data is code, code is data. Load it into memory, write it to a file. With 500 products, maybe even 1000 products, maybe even 10000, or more, this might work fine, in terms of performance, at least.
Now, my critique of the code is that there are no apparent abstractions, which means that it will be very difficult to change anything about the implementation later. All of the hard coded indices from 0 to 7 are very opaque and very brittle.
However, change those to JSON-ish dictionaries and add some slightly higher level abstractions, and you could get something that looks a little more like the interface to a MySQL database.
So what I find interesting about putting this as a WTF with no explanation is that the author just seems to assume that everyone should use a relational database for every problem without thinking about how good a fit it is for their specific problem. At least, without more explanation it's hard to tell what exactly the assumed critique is.
This is a groundbreaking implementation of a cutting edge NoSQL storage system! What is it doing on the Daily WTF? Some incompetent tech team in NYC or somewhere should be congratulating themselves for installing it.
Back around '05, I inherited the enviable task of getting a "linked project scheduling system" up and running. The creator of this MS-Project-based marvel had implemented an employee database in a VB module, that not only avoided the hassles of ADO and SQL, but almost managed to do away with arrays completely! Switch/Case statements, anyone?
By the way, if needles and haystacks are your thing, try a Google search on Microsoft Project. Hours of fun!
It's funny to see how they rationalise problems later as being entirely necessary to the problem (I've witnessed this first hand), and nothing to do with a misapprehension of the difficulty of the problem.
Am I the only one here who finds the dailywtf sometimes extremely depressing?!
[1]:http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/being-the-averagest