WTF : The Inner JSON Effect

I’ve seen my share of horrible systems, but I haven’t seen anything this bad:

“So you have ‘customers.json’ and ‘customers.js’. The JSON file is the metadata and the JS file has all the code. So the list of functions in the JSON file tells JDSL to look up those revisions of the JS file to find what functions are available. In this case the actual code is in revisions 568, 899, 900, 901, and so on.”

Although I’ve seen a system before that breaks when adding code comments to certain files (as it was parsing source code with regular expressions, rather then with the language parser):

“Well, yes. I added a few code comments, trying to–”

“You can’t use comments in JDSL!” Tom shouted. “THAT’S WHAT BROKE IT!!”

Jake stayed silent, trying to process how code comments could wipe out a customer database. Tom continued after a pause. “I haven’t added comment support to JDSL, so the runtime executes comments like normal code! You must have had database updates in some comments?!”

“Well, yeah, I put a couple short syntax examples in a comment to clarify–”

Tom burst to his feet. “I knew it! You BROKE IT!” He turned to face the VPs. “I can’t deal with coders who don’t understand the system! You will either fire Jake…or I quit!” And he stormed out of the room.