Another point for Rob Glover... he reminded me about one of my pet hates yesterday... CFML code in which the dev has closed the tags. I wrote an article about closing CFML tags ages ago. But what else annoys me in my CFML world?
Here's a list of CFML- or dev-oriented pete peeves of mine. In no particular order. And why? Just for the hell of it, on a slow news day.
The idea that pointless closing CFML tags is "a thing"
'nuff said.Comments that simply state what the next line of code is doing
eg:// create the object
theObject = createObject("TheComponent");
Seriously? F*** off if you do that. If a person is looking at that file, they understand CFML (or at least they should, and comments are not the way to solve that if it's not the case!), and reading the code is a fine way of identifying what the code does.
This is made worse by poorly maintained code in which the comments reflect the state of the code as it was a year earlier, but not how it is now.
Use comments to explain what's not already on the screen, and not readily inferrable from what's on the screen: why you're doing something, how an algorithm works, or an explanation of why unlikely-looking code needs to be the way it is (eg: some third-party service wanting dates as strings, or something).
Copying and pasting of code instead of refactoring
If you want the same functionality somewhere else in your code base: refactor, don't copy and paste (or as I term it in this context: "cu*t and paste". Because if you do it: you are one). I don't know how many times I've needed to fix something only to find out that the same bit of logic exists in several places in the code base.Using tags in logic-only files
Tags are for interacting with mark-up. They are clumsy and clunky-looking when used in logic-only files. The only time they should be used in these cases is when Adobe have dropped the ball and there is no script-compatible implementation of the given functionality.Not RTFMing (or should that be "RingTFM"?)
Asking questions (especially in a written forum) before even bothering to just look up the answer in the docs. Or via Google. It's just laziness, and people like that do not deserve the help they are soliciting.CFML's "Wizard" tags
Like anything to do with the UI (<cfform>, <cfpod> etc), and including <cfinsert> and <cfupdate>. Have some pride: do your work properly.Adobe's attitude to their clients
Their support of and participation in their developer community is appalling.Not understanding when to use #
Thanks to David Nash for this one. Its not complicated (like when to use an apostrophe), yet so many people simply do'nt bother to learn the languages' syntax properly. NB: sic.Not having a basic understanding of computing
Not understanding why floating point numbers are inaccurate, why data types have size limitations; or how Javascript runs on a client machine and ColdFusion runs on a server and the two don't interact directly, etc. I don't expect people to be able to write a C compiler (cue Sean to say something along the lines that he has ;-), or know the intricacies of the architecture of a CPU, but an understanding of the basics of the tool set one uses daily for one's career.Being partisan about technology
Because I use Railo doesn't mean ColdFusion is automatically the villain (it's not for those reasons), or if I like CFML then PHP automatically sux, etc. Or I like Apple products therefore Microsoft products are automatically bad, etc. I know we work in IT, but not everything is binary. And you sound stupid if you hold opinions like that.That's a random ten. There'll be others, and things that annoy me more, but happen less frequently so have not sprung to mind in the last 15min since I decided to write this.
I'm sure you'll disagree with at least some of these, or have some other ones of your own. Go on then...
--
Adam
