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What's one of the ugliest piece of code you've written so far?

Patrik Kiss on December 19, 2019

We have all written ugly code so far, that's a fact. Some are just bad, some are worse. And some other ones are just disgusting. Naturally, I'm no ...

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tomassiriouala • Dec 19 '19

I once wrote a boolToInt

int boolToInt(boolean bool){
     if(bool){
          return 1;
     else{
          return 0;
     }
}

Not proud. It was my first year

Patrik Kiss • Dec 20 '19

That is ugly indeed. What were you even doing there?

Here, I corrected your code

int boolToInt(boolean bool){
     if(bool===true && bool!==false){
          return 1;
     else{
          return 0;
     }
}

MurrayVarey • Dec 19 '19

Ah, I see the problem -- you should have used a ternary operator!

Ben Sinclair • Dec 20 '19

It should use an IntegerFactory.

MurrayVarey • Dec 20 '19

Slaps forehead. Of course! Better make it Abstract, just to be sure.

Samba Diallo • Dec 19 '19

10/10, I'd include it in every file of a project for the enjoyment of those reading my code.

Casey Brooks • Dec 19 '19 • Edited

I once wrote something in JavaScript

Patrik Kiss • Dec 19 '19

Oh man, I can't imagine what you must've been through

Ben Sinclair • Dec 20 '19

shh!

frantically makes shushing motions *

Ben Lovy • Dec 19 '19

I think this snippet of ReasonML is pretty horrible, from my very first larger functional programming project:

let add_extended_room = (school, classroom) => {
  let target = ref(school.classrooms);

  if (Array.length(target^) == 0) {
    target := Array.append(target^, Array.make(1, classroom));
  } else {
    let already_included =
      Array.map((oldr: classroom) => oldr.letter, school.classrooms);
    let found = ref(false);
    let idx = ref(0) /* This will only be read later if found is toggled to true*/;
    Array.iteri(
      (i, l) =>
        if (classroom.letter == l) {
          found := true;
          idx := i;
        },
      already_included,
    );
    if (found^) {
      /* We've already seen this letter - mash the new kid list into the matching existing kid list */
      let old_classroom = school.classrooms[idx^];
      let new_classroom = {
        ...old_classroom,
        capacity:
          get_extended_capacity(classroom.letter, school.extended_day_config)
          |> int_of_string,
        kids: ref(Array.append(old_classroom.kids^, classroom.kids^)),
      };
      target^[idx^] = new_classroom;
    } else {
      /* This is a new extended day room - add it as-is, grabbing the extended day capacity */
      target :=
        Array.append(
          target^,
          Array.make(
            1,
            {
              ...classroom,
              capacity:
                get_extended_capacity(
                  classroom.letter,
                  school.extended_day_config,
                )
                |> int_of_string,
            },
          ),
        );
    };
  };

  {...school, classrooms: target^};
};

let get_extended_rooms = school => {
  /* Returns a `school` of the extended kids */
  let s = get_extended_kids(school);
  Array.fold_left(
    add_extended_room,
    {...school, classrooms: [||]},
    s.classrooms,
  );
};

It takes a list of classrooms, each containing a letter and a list of kids, and returns a subset of them, using rules from separate list of classrooms and parameters for transforming the data. It's a bit of a complicated operation by nature, but it could have been broken down or broken out into sub-steps. Writing one massive convoluted fold is not the way to go.

This technically works, but I'm seriously glad I never had to make any sort of change to it, and I can only tell you what it does now because I remember the problem, not because looking at this code means anything to me.

Petar Petrov • Dec 20 '19 • Edited

Ha! I totally have it thanks to instant messaging keeping logs of images I share,
behold!

Basically its the logic that handles how you go through a grid (keyboard keys) and handles the cases where you go left right top bottom and there is no key...

thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i...

mlaj • Dec 20 '19 • Edited

I had to work in this code, but didn't create it.

Page rendering made of only PHP echo statements in a Zend framework controller (not view!). There was html, CSS, js, jquery and PHP conditions in this spaghetti mess. The code was around 800 lines long and was a very important part of the website. That site also had 3 very different versions of jquery running on different pages.

That was one of the first things I worked on during my internship after graduating. I almost cried the first time I saw it.

Tech2Blog.com • Dec 21 '19

I think we could have given more checks to this simple bash script which was used to backup the website automatically using Cron job.

Chris Shaffer • Dec 19 '19

I’m just impressed that you didn’t use jQuery.

Patrik Kiss • Dec 19 '19 • Edited

Well, I wrote this code when we had only been learning web development for like 1 month.

Jquery or any kind of framework wasn't even mentioned for the next 2 months(yeah it was a slow course, and we had learned Java more back then). We only learned basics like HTML, CSS, JS(the very very basics)

And I started using that little knowledge I had to make a website

Even with so little knowledge about JS, I was far ahead of anyone in the course