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Non-programmers will most likely not understand a word i'm writing here but maybe those with a programming background will get a laugh from it:
Today we released our mobile VOD platform and as with any big release, there was some trouble. Less than expected considering that half the backend was changed but gits great merging kept a lot of trouble away from us.
However, there was one bug that my colleagues couldn't figure out so i had to jump in to help. I spent 20 minutes searching for it, tracing through several functions, the huge if($action == 'asdf') {}elseif ($action == 'bvcx') {}... block, etc. and at first i couldn't find it either. It looked as if he went into a block where the if condition was a constant defined as false compared to true.
if (MOBILE_TEMPLATE == true)
{
// the code he shouldn't reach in this case
}
Apart fromt he fact that "== true" doesn't make sense anyways, the code shouldn't enter this block in the situation we were testing. My colleague showed me the debug output of MOBILE_TEMPLATE which clearly showed that it's false.
After going through everything step-by-step and testing the variables myself i found this gem in my debug output:
string(5) "false"
Checking the declarations i found the source of the bug:
if ($product_id == 1)
{
define('MOBILE_TEMPLATE', 'false');
}
else
{
define('MOBILE_TEMPLATE', 'true');
}
If you know your PHP, you will know that the string "false" evaluates to true in a boolean comparision since it's not an empty string.
Now i ordered the two guys responsible to fix that ASAP. They started with changing the code to:
if (MOBILE_TEMPLATE == 'true')
{
...
}
I wanted to punch them sooooo hard.
Luckily i'm out of here at the end of the month...
  
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Are those guys students or what ? Can't imagine people with a finished degree are doing such facepalm-worthy things.
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Good luck finding a job where noone ever make mistakes.
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And this is exactly why I prefer languages that are more strongly typed than PHP (which is pretty much every language).
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On September 10 2012 19:42 gaymon wrote:
Are those guys students or what ? Can't imagine people with a finished degree are doing such facepalm-worthy things.
They finished their degrees but this company doesn't exactly look for the brightest employees, only the cheapest, which is why we ended up with a team of programmers that write such bad code on a daily basis. I spend more time helping them to fix their messes than i spend actually doing my work.
There isn't a single day where they don't ask me "How can i do <stupid thing>?" and i have to go over and find out what mess they produced to get into a situation where they would want to do <stupid thing>.
When i started programming professionally a decade back i thought i'd be amongst the most intelligent people working on expanding their knowledge to write perfect code.
Reality hit me hard.
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"Perfect" code takes far longer than companies are willing to allow. You're dealing with less knowledgeable people because skilled coders cost too much, and shorter time frames to meet deadlines, meaning you get generic and mangled code that works, rather than spending the time to find a more elegant solution.
Sure, there are plenty of programmers that look for solutions in their spare time, or make it their goal to find elegance in projects, but they are likely freelancing or simply working by themselves. Finding such skill in someone attached to a company (that isn't a start-up) is rare. Companies are getting the ones who slugged it out in college/university and can hack together some code to do the basic stuff they need; they're far from the passionate people that end up becoming entrepreneurs most of the time.
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hows the view from up there?
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How much do these guys earn? I'm wondering because I myself am a bad coder but still I couldn't code as poorly as this. Earning anything more than you would earn at fast food in programming with no knowledge on php boolean doesn't make sense.
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On September 10 2012 23:42 Djagulingu wrote:
How much do these guys earn? I'm wondering because I myself am a bad coder but still I couldn't code as poorly as this. Earning anything more than you would earn at fast food in programming with no knowledge on php boolean doesn't make sense.
Of course i can't give exact numbers but it's far below industry average of anyone coming fresh from university. I earn around 75% of what any programmer fresh from university would earn and i'm the highest paid programmer in the team by quite a big margin.
There are only 2 reasons why people work here:
1. Every other job didn't want them (me)
2. They don't know better
I don't expect them to be great programmers, i can live with
... their 500 line if-elseif-elseif-...-else functions
... the fact that they write every number as "123" (with quotes)
... that they can't differentiate between a file_get_contents on an URL or a file
... their 5000+ line functioncollection files
... the fact that they couldn't debug their way out of a recursion if their life depended on it
... that they repeatedly try to use variables that were never defined
... their complete lack of object-oriented code or even understanding
but this example of complete lack of understanding of basic types today just made me facepalm, especially since instead of correcting the mistake they merrily went ahead to make it worse until i stopped them.
Just for the laughs, another example that popped up today while fixing the bugs in the release:
if ((...) && !$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == '....' )
{
}
I told them a hundred times "Better to use a few paranthesis too much than have an expression that doesn't do what you think it does".
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I'm pretty bad at php.
When you define do you have to do something like
if ($product_id == 1)
{
define('MOBILE_TEMPLATE', FALSE);
}
else
{
define('MOBILE_TEMPLATE', TRUE);
}
?
edit: yeah that looks right to me. You should tell your friends to get a syntax highlighting text editor. Then they won't define something as a string when they mean to define it as a bool.
Why do you need to use define? Can't you just set a variable to true or false? Or is define just used for case sensitivity?
if (MOBILE_TEMPLATE == 'true')
{
...
}
Missing a $sign.
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On September 11 2012 04:26 obesechicken13 wrote:I'm pretty bad at php. When you define do you have to do something like
if ($product_id == 1)
{
define('MOBILE_TEMPLATE', FALSE);
}
else
{
define('MOBILE_TEMPLATE', TRUE);
}
? edit: yeah that looks right to me. You should tell your friends to get a syntax highlighting text editor. Then they won't define something as a string when they mean to define it as a bool. Why do you need to use define? Can't you just set a variable to true or false? Or is define just used for case sensitivity?
if (MOBILE_TEMPLATE == 'true')
{
...
}
Missing a $sign.
A define is PHPs version of a constant, i.e. a variable that can't be changed once it is set. They don't have a $ in front of their name and it's customary to write them in all caps to differentiate them from PHP keywords.
They are usually used to set configuration values that are required throughout the whole project. In 90% of the cases they are used wrong though, bad programmers abuse them to break encapsulation and have their functions depend on those defines instead of using function parameters, which makes stuff like unit testing almost impossible.
You could use a variable and define it as global everywhere you use them but you can't rely on them keeping the value you expect, other functions might change it.
Also, they are already using a syntax highlighting editor - they are bad programmers, not (completely) stupid - and luckily they are not my friends, i already have enough reasons to hate my life, i don't need such friends.
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So basically they assigned the text "true" or "false" to a variable and mistook it for the Boolean value true and false, and then they tried to compare the variable with a true false comparison in which case it would always come true since both "true" and "false" where an actually string and therefore it would be true no matter what.
That's brilliant.
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Hyrule19167 Posts
I prefer to do something like
if ($product_id == 1)
{
define('USING_MOBILE', 1);
}
...
if(defined(USING_MOBILE))
{
whatever
}
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Hyrule19167 Posts
On September 10 2012 23:42 Djagulingu wrote:
How much do these guys earn? I'm wondering because I myself am a bad coder but still I couldn't code as poorly as this. Earning anything more than you would earn at fast food in programming with no knowledge on php boolean doesn't make sense.
Bad coders can be had for about $20/hour in most places....
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Zurich15356 Posts
On September 10 2012 23:42 Djagulingu wrote:
How much do these guys earn? I'm wondering because I myself am a bad coder but still I couldn't code as poorly as this. Earning anything more than you would earn at fast food in programming with no knowledge on php boolean doesn't make sense.
Oh don't worry there are very highly paid programmers who do worse things.
I don't find it excusable either, but so many people just don't give enough fucks to actually learn programming before or while they are programming.
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On September 10 2012 19:01 Morfildur wrote:Now i ordered the two guys responsible to fix that ASAP. They started with changing the code to:
if (MOBILE_TEMPLATE == 'true')
{
...
}
I wanted to punch them sooooo hard. Luckily i'm out of here at the end of the month...
So, not being a programmer myself, why doesn't their solution work ?
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On September 11 2012 07:10 Geiko wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2012 19:01 Morfildur wrote:Now i ordered the two guys responsible to fix that ASAP. They started with changing the code to:
if (MOBILE_TEMPLATE == 'true')
{
...
}
I wanted to punch them sooooo hard. Luckily i'm out of here at the end of the month... So, not being a programmer myself, why doesn't their solution work ?
The problem is that they are using string operators when they should be using boolean. It clearly demonstrates that they have no fucking idea of what they are doing.
EDIT; let me clarify.
When you want to actually want to type something, like some sort of output to the user for example you would use a string, like this:
$string =' hello this is a message to the user';
echo $string;
However in this case they are simply to evaluate what path to take in a condition:
IF ($condition==true) {
}
In this case using a string makes no sense and a boolean should be used instead.
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On September 11 2012 07:10 Geiko wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2012 19:01 Morfildur wrote:Now i ordered the two guys responsible to fix that ASAP. They started with changing the code to:
if (MOBILE_TEMPLATE == 'true')
{
...
}
I wanted to punch them sooooo hard. Luckily i'm out of here at the end of the month... So, not being a programmer myself, why doesn't their solution work ?
It's still comparing to a string rather than a bool, so that's just bad practice. Not only that, but whatever they want the revised code to do is not what the original code was supposed to do. That's just bad logic.
On September 11 2012 06:32 Morfildur wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2012 04:26 obesechicken13 wrote:I'm pretty bad at php. When you define do you have to do something like
if ($product_id == 1)
{
define('MOBILE_TEMPLATE', FALSE);
}
else
{
define('MOBILE_TEMPLATE', TRUE);
}
? edit: yeah that looks right to me. You should tell your friends to get a syntax highlighting text editor. Then they won't define something as a string when they mean to define it as a bool. Why do you need to use define? Can't you just set a variable to true or false? Or is define just used for case sensitivity?
if (MOBILE_TEMPLATE == 'true')
{
...
}
Missing a $sign. A define is PHPs version of a constant, i.e. a variable that can't be changed once it is set. They don't have a $ in front of their name and it's customary to write them in all caps to differentiate them from PHP keywords. They are usually used to set configuration values that are required throughout the whole project. In 90% of the cases they are used wrong though, bad programmers abuse them to break encapsulation and have their functions depend on those defines instead of using function parameters, which makes stuff like unit testing almost impossible. You could use a variable and define it as global everywhere you use them but you can't rely on them keeping the value you expect, other functions might change it. Also, they are already using a syntax highlighting editor - they are bad programmers, not (completely) stupid - and luckily they are not my friends, i already have enough reasons to hate my life, i don't need such friends.
Ah thanks.
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Zurich15356 Posts
It does work. But instead of fixing the initial mistake they introduced another mistake which kinda masks the initial mistake on the surface. It'll work, it's just ugly and not the way it's supposed to be done.
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On September 11 2012 07:15 Integra wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2012 07:10 Geiko wrote:On September 10 2012 19:01 Morfildur wrote:Now i ordered the two guys responsible to fix that ASAP. They started with changing the code to:
if (MOBILE_TEMPLATE == 'true')
{
...
}
I wanted to punch them sooooo hard. Luckily i'm out of here at the end of the month... So, not being a programmer myself, why doesn't their solution work ? The problem is that they are using string operators when they should be using boolean. It clearly demonstrates that they have no fucking idea of what they are doing. EDIT; let me clarify. When you want to actually want to type something, like some sort of output to the user for example you would use a string, like this:
$string =' hello this is a message to the user';
echo $string;
However in this case they are simply to evaluate what path to take in a condition:
IF ($condition==true) {
}
In this case using a string makes no sense and a boolean should be used instead.
Ok that's what I thought too.
But after making the mistake to use strings instead of booleans, isn't it faster to fix the bug like they did, rather than change the type of the variable and risk having bugs every other place where the variable was used ?
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EPT
