CodeSOD: Dating in Another Language

It takes a lot of time and effort to build a code base that exceeds 100kloc. Rome wasn’t built in a day; it just burned down in one.

Liza was working in a Python shop. They had a mildly successful product that ran on Linux. The sales team wanted better sales software to help them out, and instead of buying something off the shelf, they hired a C# developer to make something entirely custom.

Within a few months, that developer had produced a codebase of 320kloc I say “produced” and not “wrote” because who knows how much of it was copy/pasted, stolen from Stack Overflow, or otherwise not the developer’s own work.

You have to wonder, how do you get such a large codebase so quickly?

private String getDatum()
{
    DateTime datum = new DateTime();
    datum = DateTime.Now;
    return datum.ToShortDateString();
}

public int getTag()
{
    int tag;
    DateTime datum = new DateTime();
    datum = DateTime.Today;
    tag = datum.Day;
    return tag;
}

private int getMonat()
{
    int monat;
    DateTime datum = new DateTime();
    datum = DateTime.Today;
    monat = datum.Month;
    return monat;
}

private int getJahr()
{
    int monat;
    DateTime datum = new DateTime();
    datum = DateTime.Today;
    monat = datum.Year;
    return monat;
}

private int getStunde()
{
    int monat;
    DateTime datum = new DateTime();
    datum = DateTime.Now;
    monat = datum.Hour;
    return monat;
}

private int getMinute()
{
    int monat;
    DateTime datum = new DateTime();
    datum = DateTime.Now;
    monat = datum.Minute;
    return monat;
}

Instead of our traditional “bad date handling code” which eschews the built-in libraries, this just wraps the built in libraries with a less useful set of wrappers. Each of these could be replaced with some version of DateTime.Now.Minute.

You’ll notice that most of the methods are private, but one is public. That seems strange, doesn’t it? Well this set of methods was pulled from one random class which implements them in the codebase, but many classes have these methods copy/pasted in. At some point, the developer realized that duplicating that much code was a bad idea, and started marking them as public, so that you could just call them as needed. Note, said developer never learned to use the keyword static, so you end up calling the method on whatever random instance of whatever random class you happen to have handy. The idea of putting it into a common base class, or dedicated date-time utility class never occurred to the developer, but I guess that’s because they were already part of a dedicated date-time utility class.

[Advertisement]
BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!

Source: Read More