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Wait, What?

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Re: Wait, What?

#5

Post by mbenjaminsmith »

Looks like it's preventing most exceptions of that type from being logged. That would make sense if it's the type of exception likely to repeat itself constantly (until addressed). Using a random number as a gate is easier than measuring/throttling the rate that you're logging at.

Re: Wait, What?

#6

Post by 300bps »

I can't figure out why some developers love writing lines of code like that. It's like they think there is a cost for every line of code so they attempt to use the fewest lines possible while making their intent difficult to discern without comments.

I had a young developer work for me that did this all the time. He was actually quite brilliant - but he would put sometimes 20 statements into one line of code that would scroll past the end of the screen. It was difficult to discern intent but even worse it was impossible to debug. I asked him several times if he was taking his programming style from:

http://thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html

Re: Wait, What?

#7

Post by shawabawa3 »

mbenjaminsmith wrote: post #5

Looks like it's preventing most exceptions of that type from being logged. That would make sense if it's the type of exception likely to repeat itself constantly (until addressed). Using a random number as a gate is easier than measuring/throttling the rate that you're logging at.

That's the first "wait, what?". However, if you actually try and work out that horrible if statement

    !((_ok) ? true : (Math.random() > 0.1))

    _ok ? false : !(Math.random() > 0.1)

    !_ok && Math.random()
Seems fine...until you realise that this is the condition to exit early, it's still logging 90% of the time which is almost certainly not the desired behavior.

Not to mention _ok is a terrible name for that variable, and it's only ever being used as a negation. Why isn't it called _error or something?

Re: Wait, What?

#8

Post by m12k »

mbenjaminsmith wrote: post #5

Looks like it's preventing most exceptions of that type from being logged. That would make sense if it's the type of exception likely to repeat itself constantly (until addressed). Using a random number as a gate is easier than measuring/throttling the rate that you're logging at.

Also, if we ignore for a moment how hacky it is to implement throttling like this - why would someone write

   if(!((_ok) ? true : (Math.random() > 0.1)))
when you could use

   if(!(_ok || Math.random() > 0.1))
or just

   if(!_ok && Math.random()

Re: Wait, What?

#9

Post by aquarion »

m12k wrote: post #8
mbenjaminsmith wrote: post #5

Looks like it's preventing most exceptions of that type from being logged. That would make sense if it's the type of exception likely to repeat itself constantly (until addressed). Using a random number as a gate is easier than measuring/throttling the rate that you're logging at.

Also, if we ignore for a moment how hacky it is to implement throttling like this - why would someone write if(!((_ok) ? true : (Math.random() > 0.1))) when you could use if(!(_ok || Math.random() > 0.1)) or just if(!_ok && Math.random()

Because Math.random's expensive and you don't want to execute it unless you're sure.

Re: Wait, What?

#10

Post by drharris »

aquarion wrote: post #9
m12k wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, if we ignore for a moment how hacky it is to implement throttling like this - why would someone write if(!((_ok) ? true : (Math.random() > 0.1))) when you could use if(!(_ok || Math.random() > 0.1)) or just if(!_ok && Math.random()

Because Math.random's expensive and you don't want to execute it unless you're sure.

Expensive only really matters in a loop. And this logical operator would short circuit anyway.
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