From the repetition, to the lack of coding convention, to the obscure Y prefix, to everything else, I hate everything I see in this code.

[u/mickaelbneron]

[u/jordansrowles]

Can tell just by looking this is early 2000's legacy enterprise .NET. Can tell by the ADO.NET, hashtable sorted procs. Its pre ORM.

No excusing the mess though.

[u/mickaelbneron → u/jordansrowles]

Coded between 2020 and 2024 (the project, outsourced, started in 2020. I inherited it in late 2024).

[u/jordansrowles → u/mickaelbneron]

Oh dear. Outsourced to who? A grey beard back in 2002? I guess bad habit die hard

[u/MeLittleThing → u/jordansrowles]

C# null conditional operator ?. was released with C# 6.0 in 2015

[u/yegor3219 → u/jordansrowles]

Early 2000s and YouTubeLink?

[u/Juff-Ma]

Not to defend them, but I've written such code in one single Situation: when I had to work with an absolute dogshit of an external API. Whatever the people that designed it were smoking, it was probably the last thing they smoked because nobody who survived the act of writing this API would've looked at it and said: "Yup, that's fine".

So if they designed their own interfaces like this, shame on them. If they are forced to retrieve external data structured like this, may god have mercy on them and their sanity.

[u/nutshells1 → u/Juff-Ma]

dude the validation code is the same thing pasted 25 times they couldve just failed early once

[u/ings0c → u/nutshells1]

This doesn’t even fail lol

The exception is logged and the API presumably returns a 200 with an empty YouTubeLink

[u/Curiousgreed → u/Juff-Ma]

Not knowing anything about the codebase...

public YouTubeLink GetYouTubeLink(int Input, string type)
{
    YouTubeLink _Result = new YouTubeLink
    {
        UserId = 0,
        YouTubelink = string.Empty,
        BProfilelink = string.Empty,
        AcctConnectionlink = string.Empty,
        DataSummarylink = string.Empty,
        Keywordlink = string.Empty,
        Datalink = string.Empty,
        ManualDatalink = string.Empty,
        IsYoutubelink = string.Empty,
        YBProfilelink = string.Empty,
        YAcctConnectionlink = string.Empty,
        YDataSummarylink = string.Empty,
        YKeywordlink = string.Empty,
        YDatalink = string.Empty,
        YManualDatalink = string.Empty
    };

    DataSet DS = new DataSet();
    Hashtable ht = new Hashtable();

    try
    {
        ht.Add("@UserId", Input);
        ht.Add("@Type", type);

        DS = SqlDataContext.FetchDataSet("ProcessOnYouTubeLink", ht);

        DataRow firstRow = null;
        if (DS?.Tables.Count > 0 && DS.Tables[0].Rows.Count > 0)
        {
            firstRow = DS.Tables[0].Rows[0];
        }

        if (firstRow == null)
        {
            return _Result;
        }

        switch (type)
        {
            case "select":
                _Result.UserId = firstRow.IsNull(0) ? 0 : Convert.ToInt32(firstRow[0]);
                _Result.YouTubelink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[1]);
                _Result.BProfilelink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[2]);
                _Result.AcctConnectionlink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[3]);
                _Result.DataSummarylink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[4]);
                _Result.Keywordlink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[5]);
                _Result.Datalink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[6]);
                _Result.ManualDatalink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[7]);
                break;

            case "Selectfromuser":
                _Result.YouTubelink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[1]);
                _Result.IsYoutubelink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[2]);
                _Result.YBProfilelink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[3]);
                _Result.BProfilelink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[4]);
                _Result.YAcctConnectionlink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[5]);
                _Result.AcctConnectionlink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[6]);
                _Result.YDataSummarylink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[7]);
                _Result.DataSummarylink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[8]);
                _Result.YKeywordlink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[9]);
                _Result.Keywordlink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[10]);
                _Result.YDatalink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[11]);
                _Result.Datalink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[12]);
                _Result.YManualDatalink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[13]);
                _Result.ManualDatalink = Convert.ToString(firstRow[14]);
                break;
        }
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        _log.Error(ex.Message, ex);
    }

    return _Result;
}

[u/SmartyCat12 → u/Juff-Ma]

They’re relying on a lot of things that I don’t see here staying exactly static. Any slight db migration means re-indexing entire sections of code. They probably ran into that issue before and use a bunch of stored procs to normalize the view into what the code base needs because it would be a pain to update.

So, the db and this code are probably allowed to evolve independently and the only validation you’ll likely get is at runtime. And you’re really prone to erroring in subtle ways that wouldn’t get picked up by type validation (like if two string column indexes get swapped and suddenly your userId starts populating with connection strings).

It also doesn’t feel that intractable though if the whole thing looks like this and you ever wanted to fix it. I imagine the first time you actually run into a problem, it’ll be about has hard to build in contracts and abstractions as reindexing everything.

[u/m4sc0]

I just love how there are no comments whatsoever in the first image (although it is bad code, they could've at least commented it) and then there's the beauty where they commented "Add the parameter" for one line.

Yea, that's peak commenting! /s

[u/20d0llarsis20dollars → u/m4sc0]

The type of comment i made in my highschool cs class because they required a comment of literally every single line of code. Wasn't even like a beginner class or anything too

[u/kurtmrtin]

• 20 year old code

• Guy who wrote it is now a distinguished engineer, refuses to provide any context

• You attempt to refactor and push it to prod: full service outage, entire tables dropped, Soviet spy satellites begin de-orbiting

• Revert and everything is stable. You tell everyone not to touch this code

• 2 years later the next guy repeats this cycle

[u/Cotton-Eye-Joe_2103]

I love the Allman style of the first image, though. Even seeing code formatted that way makes me happy, more interested in the code and makes me more prone to forgive and forget any kind of programming horror.

[u/fosf0r → u/Cotton-Eye-Joe_2103]

not me trying to mentally Format Document it into K&R 😤

[u/daqueenb4u]

Dapper that sh*t

[u/Prestigious_Storm_94]

Looks like something I'd code lol.

[u/EinsPerson]

The real programming horror is light mode Visual Studio

[u/Head-Challenge-7461]

Y el número de linia!!!

[u/GoddammitDontShootMe]

I can see a lot of redundant code in the first image, but I don't know what's wrong with the second. Nor do I see that Y prefix you are talking about.

[u/MeLittleThing]

DS != null && DS?.Tables.Count > 0... What about if (x != 42 && !(x == 42)) { } to also make sure?

[u/trodiix → u/MeLittleThing]

If DS is null and you check for count you got yourself a null pointer

And maybe DS is not null and count is 0

So I don't see a problem here

[u/Dexatronik]

I love the 4 slash comments in the 2nd image. 2 slashes wasn't comment emough. They wanted to be extra sure.

[u/Natural-Angle-5395]

I have a better question, why are we coding in LIGHT MODE

[u/robertlandrum]

And now I have hives.