What happens when you search 'ugly hack' in GitHub

https://github.com/search?q=ugly+hack&ref=cmdform&type=Code

by BaltoRouberol • 12 years ago

73 68 12 years ago

github.com

KhalPanda2• 12 years ago

It looks like ugly hacks are far more popular than clever ones.

https://github.com/search?q=clever+hack&type=Code&ref=search...

duiker101• 12 years ago

because "ugly hack" is a warning to however might want to fiddle with it, clever hack is more just a show off.

KhalPanda2• 12 years ago

That, and ugly hacks are easier. I was only kidding. :-)

reidrac• 12 years ago

Look for dirty hacks; still... C way ahead the rest.

Interesting that "ugly" places PHP over Javascript, but "dirty" is the other way around.

I wonder what does it mean. The comments and the "ugly" or "dirty" qualifiers are just part of the perception of the person writing the comment, and they're contributing to spread that perception to others.

What qualifies as "ugly", "dirty" and "clever", or even as "hack", may be quite different depending on the language and the community behind it.

leni536• 12 years ago

Yeah, I don't think "ugly hack" or any other variants is frequent in bash script comments.

kvirani• 12 years ago

Mostly C!

amirmc• 12 years ago

I'd be curious to see if there's a relationship between 'ugly hack' in code commits and the languages being used (though it'd probably say more about the programmer than the language). The bar chart on the left of the page hints that it's possible, but would have to be normalised.

My hypothesis is there'd be no real difference, but it would be fun to explore nonetheless.

fuzzix2• 12 years ago

I'd be curious to see if there's a relationship between 'ugly hack' in code commits and the languages being used

Perl is not in their list.

Either everything we do is an ugly hack, or everything we do is simple and elegant. :)

giancarlostoro• 12 years ago

Or... nobody writes in Perl anymore... or... every Perl developer is a seasoned Perl developer.

exabrial• 12 years ago

I would think the left bar would remain accurate. C lets you shoot yourself and people do it. PHP is terrible for a lot of well documented reasons. Javascript is being used for things it originally never envisioned.

The hyped dynamic languages sort of surprise me, with their modern APIs. I'm guessing most of that is poor framework programing.

Finally, Java's numbers? lol. Its a brave new world. If this was 8 years ago in ejb v1.2 Java world have taken the crown.

n0body2• 12 years ago

I have no idea why this is on the front page.

mkesper• 12 years ago

fun? meta-programming?

n0body2• 12 years ago

You and I have a very different definition of fun, and meta-programming.

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

400k results for C, the next one is 40k for PHP

mysterywhiteboy• 12 years ago

Another fun search on GitHub - looking for the code paradox i.e. this should "never happen".

https://github.com/search?l=c&p=7&q=never+happen&ref=searchr...

miohtama2• 12 years ago

Looks like Ruby doesn't have ugly hacks.

hugofirth2• 12 years ago

Haha:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/j7rwshax2e9zwln/Screenshot%202014-...

Not even PHP can come within a factor of 5 of C when it comes to ugly hacks.

EDIT: And its not exactly like there is a bias at work: http://goo.gl/ZezFiP

torrent-of-ions• 12 years ago

But is it because C programmers make more ugly hacks or that C programmers are more likely to know when they are making an ugly hack?

krapp• 12 years ago

I think PHP is more or less just for the web, giving C programmers more ugly hack surface overall.

Also PHP itself is an ugly hack of C anyway.

spyder• 12 years ago

There is a bias because there is more C code. The number of repositories doesn't equal to the quantity of code and if you search for general things that are used in both languages frequently then there is always more C results, for example:

https://github.com/search?p=1&q=if+&ref=searchresults&type=C...

https://github.com/search?p=1&q=return+&ref=searchresults&ty...

hugofirth2• 12 years ago

Fair enough. If there is a bias towards C I would guess it was more due to the situations in which C gets used, than C itself. Talking to a friend who has to try and get the same C/C++ codebase to compile for 6 different platforms (consoles) has been an eye opening experience. That kind of environment is like a slightly warm petri dish for ugly hacks.

pnngndclsng• 12 years ago

Simple question: does "ugly hack" mean "a quick fix before relase" ?

jobigoud• 12 years ago

It usually means that something out of your control is acting strange and you don't know or can't properly fix it, but you have found a weird workaround that should probably not even work, or an very contrived way to achieve the result.

As one obviously only writes extremely elegant code, it is important to notify the programmer coming after that you were forced to write it this way.

DCKing3• 12 years ago

I love the term 'ugly hack'. It's a very short way of saying 'a solution for a problem that assumes too much of the current context in which this component is called, and is guaranteed to break when the context changes'. It also implies 'this is intended to be temporary because I don't feel like doing the proper solution at this moment' which is accompanied with the intent 'we should fix this later' although most people who write it also have the wisdom that that almost never happens.

All of this is expressed in just two words :)

mmahemoff• 12 years ago

It's a worthy practice indeed. Bowing to the virtue of taking on some technical debt instead of deluding oneself that all code must be Pristine.

goblin892• 12 years ago

In my experience “ugly hack” means any technical debt that spans lines of code, as opposed to components of a system.

(Edited for clarity.)

DCKing3• 12 years ago

It's actually too general. What I mean with component here can be anything from a line of code to a class hierarchy.

In a sense, using the word 'component' here was an ugly hack. I should have gone for the proper solution and properly define it. You see now that it breaks down when the interpretation changes.

madeofpalk• 12 years ago

When I write it it usually means I know it sucks, but I'm reasonably happy with it - but if someone catches me out on it it's ok because I already criticised it myself

andrey-p• 12 years ago

Excellently put. It's like lampshading[1], for code.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging

brudgers2• 12 years ago

'Ugly hack' is an ugly hack of 'kludge'.

ebiester• 12 years ago

Sometimes, instead of "I don't feel like doing the proper solution," it's "I haven't yet figured out the proper solution," or "A cleaner solution means adding 250 lines of code to address problems we may not have."

watwut• 12 years ago

I love this one - someone made Java annotation for ugly hacks: https://github.com/benpage26/libxron/blob/016dd953a54eacada2...

mcv2• 12 years ago

That is some real dedication the the Java way.

namuol• 12 years ago

Pretty interesting/amusing to see the language breakdown of various words (with big grains of salt):

https://github.com/search?q=beautiful&type=Code

https://github.com/search?q=ugly&type=Code

https://github.com/search?q=lol&type=Code

https://github.com/search?q=wtf&type=Code

ntaso• 12 years ago

So, HN's hate-child PHP is funnier, more beautiful, less ugly and less confusing than sexy JavaScript. Although Python rules them all.

DCKing3• 12 years ago

To be fair, PHP has a well-known problem of a lot of people not being able to properly judge the quality of the code they write ;) [1]

[1] Of course I don't mean you, my dear PHP writing comment reader.

paddyoloughlin2• 12 years ago

Python seems to get a leg-up on the beauty stakes thanks to the popularity of the BeautifulSoup library :)

chdir• 12 years ago

If you actually look at the details, these terms aren't used in the same context as we might imagine. If there was a way to filter out useless projects, this would get interesting.

int19h• 12 years ago

There's plenty of work for C devs!

https://github.com/search?q=todo&type=Code&ref=searchresults

peaton• 12 years ago

As you said, big grains of salt... It would be probably more helpful if they were normalized by the percentage any particular language is used overall on Github.

miohtama2• 12 years ago

Maybe some ducklings too?

https://github.com/search?q=ugly+duck&type=Code&ref=searchre...

paddyoloughlin2• 12 years ago

Amusingly, a lot of Python's hits appear to be hacking the import logic.

[0] https://github.com/search?l=python&q=ugly+hack&ref=cmdform&t...

nXqd• 12 years ago

How about 'for now' :D

jamesk14022• 12 years ago

"Fix ugly hack to at least be consistent with itself", haha, this is brilliant.

wildmXranat• 12 years ago

Search for "temporary fix" https://github.com/search?q=temporary+fix&type=Code&ref=sear.... 3 million plus and counting :)

mcv2• 12 years ago

That also matches with just "fix" or "temporary". This one works better: https://github.com/search?q=%22temporary+fix%22&type=Code&re...

Now to figure out how old these are.

gjm11• 12 years ago

Some results normalized by overall language popularity. Specifically, the entry in row R and column C is 1000 * (hits for C in language R) / (hits for "the" in language R) or "---" if either the numerator or denominator was small enough not to make the top-10 list on github.

All the scraping was done by hand and the numbers rounded to a limited number of places in the process, so there may very well be mistakes.

[EDIT: oops, initially I failed to paste in the actual data.]

       ugly hack      ugly beautiful       lol       wtf     buggy
   xml       ---       ---    14.330    72.775     2.489       ---
     c     6.348    35.421     0.670     0.768     3.650    32.009
  html     1.359     9.001    34.791     4.233     3.095     5.870
    rb       ---       ---       ---     4.483     3.151       ---
    py     9.051    35.614    28.506       ---    11.135    15.066
   php     3.731     8.333     1.781    39.037     1.792     3.754
   c++     2.851    12.507       ---     0.501   102.657     7.579
    js     6.850    16.826     2.643     2.635     7.406    29.761

Tentative conclusions: Python is ugly-hack-iest and (almost exactly tied with C) ugliest; HTML is most beautiful with Python a close second, XML is lolliest, C++ is WTFiest, and C is buggiest.

Tentative meta-conclusion: these numbers have no value beyond idle amusement. But they idly amused me, so that's OK.

(The weirdest result of the lot, to me, is XML coming top for "lol". If you do the search and click on "XML" on the left you'll see why it is. Lots of instances of what I think are the same file, full of "&lol;" entities. LOL, that's pretty ugly. WTF? An ugly hack, I guess.)

BetaCygni• 12 years ago

The &lol; entities are the "Billion laughs" attack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs

BaltoRouberol• 12 years ago

bwhaha that's insane

adamc• 12 years ago

I read your table and immediately jumped to a different conclusion: That python programmers are more sensitive to ugly hacks and more likely to call them out. Not saying I'm right, but I don't know that the data can distinguish the hypotheses.

logicallee2• 12 years ago

I immediately felt the same and left a comment. But what would distinguish it is if "Go" had a high proportion of such comments, where "Perl" would have a low one.

brudgers2• 12 years ago

Not picking a language fight.

My intuition tells me that if your alternative hypothesis were true, then php programmers have higher standards because they ajudge more code 'ugly and C++ programmers are universally perfectionists...or at least when they are not confused which it appears they usually are.

Just for fun with hypothesizing, does Python's near 50/50 split between 'ugly and 'beautiful suggest a large degree of random use? Or more interestingly, does it suggest there is a tendency to classify middle cases as extreme cases, and is this a result of the community having 'a Pythonic Way?'

hornetblack• 12 years ago

I literally laughed out loud at C++ in wtf column.

steelcm• 12 years ago

There is a namespace in C++ called WTF, which probably accounts for a skew in that column.

pfultz2• 12 years ago

There is a library in C++ called Web Transaction Framework(WTF): https://github.com/belzano/WTF

logicallee2• 12 years ago

Could .py have the greatest number of "ugly hacks" because the community's standards for explicit, "beautiful" designs is higher? This would be shown if languages like Go have a much higher prevalence for "ugly hack" than a language like Perl. (Where even core language features, ahem you can complete the thought.)

zmk_• 12 years ago

Some hacks are just beautiful! https://github.com/search?q=%22beautiful+hack%22&ref=searchr...

jonheller• 12 years ago

Surprised CSS isn't on the top of this list

xvirk• 12 years ago

it's even better when you search for "temporary hack"

https://github.com/search?q=temporary+hack&type=Code&ref=sea...

buddha• 12 years ago

"dirty fix" https://github.com/search?q=dirty+fix&type=Code

aadlani• 12 years ago

No ugly hacks in ruby! that's a great news.

diminoten• 12 years ago

A modern-day batman might do this search and then submit pull requests which fix the "ugly hacks".

JimmaDaRustla• 12 years ago

Wait...you mean...I find the words "ugly hack" in source files across thousands of projects on GitHub?

stared• 12 years ago

I was not surprised to see tex (even though it is not a popular language on GitHub). It seems that one have to resort to (ugly) hacks when dealing with it.

(That said, I love its fruits.)

karlcoelho1• 12 years ago

I love how Ruby isn't even included in the list. RUBY THE BEST

What happens when you search 'ugly hack' in GitHub

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