ReFRACKtoring

Once in a while one find itself on a task where numerous WTF moments appear. You can imagine such a task?

Yes you can. It’s adding new features to legacy code/database or to a ‘WTF’ code base.

A ‘What the F***’ code base, a collection of lines of code that make you shout WTF more than is healthy. You can usually hardly call it a program. It’s a collection of blunders after blunders. Not testable due to lack of interesting unit tests, thus not refactorable (if that’s even a word) without adding a unit test.

And then comes the day. ‘Hi mister, we’d like feature X, Y, Z added to this application.’  You say, ‘ok’ and come back with a rough estimation after carefully reading the specifications. Architect and Programmers decide: ‘Should take about 4 weeks in optimal man days’, what the client then hears that it will take around 3 months. And so the waterfall started spoiling it’s liquid.

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Daily WTF

A colleague of mine recently got a question from some one he’s working with on a big Java project at a company he’s stationed for the moment:

Q: if I have a Long with value 1615 and divide it with another long with value 1000, where did the numbers behind the . go ?

“als ik een long1=1615 deel door long2=1000, waar zijn mijn nummers na de comma naartoe?”

Answer by my colleague: read the SCJP book

When he told me this I really was rofling!
Unfortunatly the questionairre really ment it. I, perhaps, should have been crying instead of laughing. My condoleances, my dear colleague that you have to program together with that kind of Java ‘programmers’

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