Binary Code

One of the sites I tend to read each day is The Daily WTF? Worse Than Failure, because it’s fun to laugh at one’s own industry.

However Code Horror, another site I tend to enjoy, has posited that the big thing wrong with WTF is that the developers who might most learn from it are the sort who’d never read it in the first place:

I can absolutely guarantee that the kinds of developers who could benefit most from reading WTF simply do not– and never will– read the WTF website.

I quite disagree. This implies there’s an “us” and a “them” and while it might be nice to be in the “us”, I think we’re actually all “them”. If we write code then at some point we’ve written code worthy of a “dude, wtf?” and chances are it’s probably still live.

In fact I myself did so just last week, as I continue to learn Ruby. I wrote a bunch of code to implement a feature I needed, then Canada Post was kind enough to deliver my copy of Programming Ruby at 9am on Saturday morning and by Saturday night I’d discovered that I could reduce roughly fourteen lines of my Ruby code to two lines of Ruby using a few built-in functions I hadn’t previously know about.

Manually re-write functionality that already exists in the language is a staple of The Daily WTF? and any seasoned Ruby developer undoubtedly would have looked at my original code and… well, you know the rest.

My first year working at Chum, almost all I did for that year was refactor the existing VB code base. It was a brutal code-base, so nasty that Jay and I practically shared daily wtf?’s, err…, well, daily. Unquestionably the three of us improved those systems by many orders of magnitude. And yet I’m certain that every now and then Jay and Jonathan come across some of my old code that today makes them think “dude, wtf?”.

You couldn’t go through your applications and find a few reasons to laugh at yourself? And then learn from it?

Code Horror continues:

I know it’s asking a lot. It’s tempting to get your daily fix of drive-by amusement and move on. But I believe it’s our collective duty to leave the profession of software engineering better than we found it. There’s so much we can do, and WTF is merely a starting point.

With this I agree and we can improve it by starting at home, admitting we’re amongst the “them”, and leading by example.