with lots of unreadable code

When is Microsoft going to get off of this “without writing any code” kick? I am sick of sitting through Microsoft presentations where someone writes some XAML or ASP.NET and makes a bunch of changes and says “Look, we did all this without writing any code!” Should I try to coin a new term which is only 1 vowel different from the term which comes to mind? BILLSHIT!!!

XML is code. The Java world has known this for years. XML Hell is a very real thing in the Spring, Struts, Hibernate past of Java. Many of the new things in Java have been a move away from the XML hell of a few years ago.

So when I see a blog post about InfoPath saying “…without code!” that has a snippet like this…

[code]
concat(substring(concat((sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) –
sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) mod 60) div 60, “:”,
sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) mod 60), 1,
(sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) mod 60 > 9) *
string-length(concat((sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) –
sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) mod 60) div 60, “:”,
sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) mod 60))),
substring(concat((sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) –
sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) mod 60) div 60, “:0”,
sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) mod 60), 1,
(sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) mod 60 < 10) *
string-length(concat((sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) –
sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) mod 60) div 60, “:0”,
sum(../my:group1/my:group2/my:TotalMinutes) mod 60))))
[/code]

…it makes me want to kill Microsoft employees and the idiot managers who buy into this BILLSHIT. It must be geared toward managers and inexperienced developers. It is all lies. Please stop the lies.

What is wrong with the above? Well, it looks like code to me. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck… we get python duck typing. If it looks like code and smells like code (and yes, it is major code smell) … it must be code!

Why is this code smell? Well can I just look at that insane expression and know what it does? Nope. It is a fine example of dailywtf worthy unreadable code.

It is code. It is bad code.