What's your biggest code smell?

Question

chislobog · Accepted Answer

The thing where flags, arguments, settings, options produce a conflict and the wrong behavior.Ex: Dropdown-Men&uuml; for , , or combined with a checkbox for [all] that grays out the Dropdown but doesn&rsquo;t change the option to [all] if is selected before checking the box.See , , , or [no updates].Same for multiple handles trying to negotiate system settings and app settings for a database with api calls like the photos app, notoriously.

AnimalMuppet · Answer

Blatantly obvious bugs and well-known bad practices every few lines. You can't ever trust the code without rewriting it function by function.Second place: All territory, no map.Is there a design document? An architecture description? Comments that tell why, not just what? If a new person starts work on the code, do they have to step through it to figure out what's going on, or is there a map, signposts, and a guidebook?

fwsgonzo · Answer

Spaghetti. I know that people like mentioning inheritance, factory and template hells, but trust me. If you've seen spaghetti, where there is no reusability in the entire codebase, then you know.There is a reason we like to think of objects as something that when constructed is valid and reusable, regardless of language. Even most decent C code looks like conservative object-oriented programming.

mrkeen · Answer

The level of abstraction doesn't change when stepping down through levels of indirection.ManagedHttpService calls HttpService which calls HttpManager which calls HttpClient. None of the above actually speaks 'http'; all of the actual http code lives in an apache dependency referred to inside HttpClient.

ahalbert2 · Answer

Duplicated code. If you want to change that block, you have to change it evrey place it occurs. It should be extracted into a common function.

prirun · Answer

No comments, few comments, irrelevant and/or unhelpful comments, confusing comments.

biglyburrito · Answer

Heavily-nested code with tons of conditional logic branches & no code comments.

mdaniel · Answer

"Biggest" is hard to quantify, but "most common" for sure is the combination of repeatedly executing the same expression (versus assigning it to a variable and using that reference multiple times) which often goes along with my red-alert "what is wrong with you?" of using one thing and logging another doAwesome(thing.otherThing().somethingElse()); LOGGER.info("I used {}", thing.otherThing().somethingElse()); // or its friend, this horseshit if (thing.otherThing().somethingElse() != null) { doSomething(thing.otherThing().somethingElse()); } else { LOGGER.warn("somethingElse was null "+thing.otherThing()); } (we will ignore the Law of Demeter for the purposes of this rant, since in my professional experience that ship has sailed)