Creative Output

To be sung to the tune of My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music (though like in my other My Favourite Things parody, the structure is modeled more on various other parodies of that song.) Feel free to record yourself singing it so I don’t have to:

Catch all exceptions; what are they the heck for?
Just return nulls that the callers won’t check for,
or show an error box, if they insist,
brought back by loops every time it’s dismissed.

Checks and injection and joins are just theories;
just add more levels of nested subqueries,
lace all your filters with unescaped strings,
fetch from a multi-use table called THINGS.

Love the warning
marks adorning
all your huge source files;
they’re all just suggestions, there’s no need to test
as long as it all compiles.

Code reuse means not one code block is wasted —
ev’ry last one has been copied and pasted.
Make up for duplicates no more the same:
reclaim some space with a one-letter name.

I’ve used these same antipatterns since FORTRAN;
why should I listen to hacks I’m paid more than?
Even my students are older than you;
how dare you tell me I need code review?

Slam resource leaks
till you’re hoarse, geeks!
Rail against that kludge.
There’s no way to beat them; you’ll have to submit
to The Daily What The Fudge.

The Daily What The Fudge being a website showcasing curious perversions in information technology; sometimes even worse than the things in this song, most of which I have to deal with every day. If you are not sure what some of these things are, or what’s so bad about them, just ask, and I’d be glad to explain. If you find these things in my code, I’ll be happy to dismiss your comments with a tale of when I was coding in BASIC back in the late 80s. I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time…

I’m on holiday for two weeks, so hopefully I will have time to make lots of cool things. Maybe even one of the music videos I’ve been wanting to do for years. This song is already the fifth idea in a row that I’ve come up with without looking at the week’s cards, and retrofitted a card to later; it might seem like cheating to you, but forcefully unblocking the creative-juice arteries is actually the aim of this project, and this is evidence that it’s working. Admiral Ackbar may not exactly fit here (I wouldn’t know) but when I saw he was the seven of clubs, I couldn’t help using him. Most of the things mentioned in this song are traps, in one way or another.