Tilted Forum Project - TFP - Sexuality, Philosophy and Political Discussion - View Single Post - What shoddy programming have you encountered?

Nimetic · 01-05-2007, 05:03 AM

I'm thinking that short descriptions are enough. Just the story, not the actual source.

For example...

A bunch of 'consulting grads' were implementing a system for a major retailer. Their 'tried and tested best practice' UNIX shell routines would log entries to a database table which had a primary key of type "date" (Oracle) - resolution to the second.

On the first occasion that multiple events occurred in rapid succession, the logging routine returned an error. This led to a call to the logging routine to log the error, which failed, which caused another call and so on.

They were fairly unhappy about being laughed at.

01-05-2007, 05:03 AM	#1 (permalink)
Nimetic Junkie Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Melbourne, Australia	What shoddy programming have you encountered? I'm thinking that short descriptions are enough. Just the story, not the actual source. For example... A bunch of 'consulting grads' were implementing a system for a major retailer. Their 'tried and tested best practice' UNIX shell routines would log entries to a database table which had a primary key of type "date" (Oracle) - resolution to the second. On the first occasion that multiple events occurred in rapid succession, the logging routine returned an error. This led to a call to the logging routine to log the error, which failed, which caused another call and so on. They were fairly unhappy about being laughed at.