Deplorable software practices

This page documents cases where I looked at a source code of some software and totally hated it. I took cases which highlight certain software practices (that may be even common) that are "The Wrong Thing(tm)".
I don't mind people who don't take the fastest/most readable/most beautiful approach - you don't have to be a master of programming to write software. But here you'll find code that is so wrong it screams at you to be fixed and you want to take the person who wrote it (I shan't dare name that person a 'programmer'), and bash him/her on the hed several times to get some clue into them.

Usually its about software managment - people just don't get how much extra work is done just because the code is a mess and no developer working on the project can pronounce "software mangment". until its too late, and you're knee-deep in twisting little source files - and maybe not even then. While there is something to be said about experience, I know personally some people who don't get it after doing more then several years of programming.
I came to accept the fact that there are people in the world that would never know how to code. I'm not talking about writing software - I'm talking about writing good software.

Email me if you have comments.

Complete lack of proper logging

• Seen: MxPortal (some dynamic web content thingy)
• Language: PHP
• Description:
  When the system encounters an error, it calls an internal handler called message_die() w/o passing any information about the source of the error except a cryptic message. for example, the code might look like this:
  

  if (!$db->query) {
      message_die("failed to xxxx");
  }
  

  Because of the database abstraction layer, they don't have access to the db last error text, so they don't even try.
  The message_die() itself is completly broken in that that it calls external files which on some cases cause it to be recalled. in order to solve that it defines a global "property" marking it as already called, and it crashes if it ever sees this property again. since these properties cannot be undefined, the function can only be called once in a program run. but the function does not enforce this by shutting the program down at the end, instead it simply calls exit() which is also used to exit from include() directives.

Treating include files as subroutines

• Seen: MxPortal (some dynamic web content thingy)
• Language: PHP
• Description:
  While possible in many languages, I've only seen this abused in PHP, a fact which underlines my deep contempt to PHP coders in general, as most of these are people who don't understand programming, doesn't have the stuff to make it as a programmer but as they have an easily accessable tool they can inflict their illogical and bogus programming on the rest of us.
  Consider the following code:
  

  function this () {
      // do something
      // do something else
      include('external_file.php');
      // do more stuff
      return;
  }
  

  I guess it comes in as some sort of code re-use. problem is - there's very little context in the call, the external file cannot return, readability goes completly out the window, you start getting bits and pieces of code scattered all over your harddrive and debugging is awful, especially if you don't have a debugger but uses shotgun debugging like most PHP developers. its a software management nightmare.
  doing the bit of extra work and wrapping it in a function and putting the include at the top of the original is very little work which allows for much better code.

Use of loops for no reason (except that the place you copied the code from uses them)

• Seen: MxPortal (some dynamic web content thingy)
• Language: PHP
• Description:
  Consider the following code:
  

  while ($row = $db->sql_fetchrow($result) ) {
      $somevar = $row['some field'];
  }
  // test $somevar
  

  There is absolutly no reason to use a loop here - you only want one value, then do a single read (and check if it fails, of course). Maybe you want just the last value, then format a sort into the query and still only get the first value.
  The only explanation that I can come up with is that the author copied it from some other place which uses the while to detect the end of input, and then completly failed to understand the difference between a while and an if.

Code duplication as an API

• Seen: MxPortal (some dynamic web content thingy)
• Language: PHP
• Description:
  Again something which I've seen most abused in PHP software. You have your software which is composed of several components. so you put each component in its own directory, and suddenly you discover that you need to re-use code that exist in one compoenent, in another. so you copy that module's include files into the original component's include and modify them to suit (for example - access a specific DB table and not the other component's table). Then you want the a component to get data from another - oh, simple: we have an include file that supplies that data, and the same include file in the other module - we'll just call the other module's include file instead of ours.
  Next thing you know, one of the files is changed in an incompatible way and software managment hell ensues.