CodeSOD: Low (Quality) Code

Like the tides, the popularity of low-code development environments comes in ebbs and flows. With each cycle, the landscape changes, old tools going away and new tools washing up on shore. One one hand, democratizing access to technology is good, on the other, these tools inevitably fail to actually do that. Instead, we get mission critical developed by people who don't understand how to develop, and are thus fragile, and released on platforms that are almost certainly going to be on legacy support in the next cycle.

I don't want to imply that low-code tools are automatically bad, or insult non-developers who want to give developing in a low-code environment a shot, though. Especially when professional developers can't really do any better.

John F's company has adopted one of the new tools in this cycle of low-code tools, Microsoft Power Apps, using the Power FX scripting language. One of the screens in their application needs to display a table of sales data, organized by month. This is how one of their developers decided to generate the list of months to draw:

FirstN([0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21, 22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29], 17)

These numbers are meant to be an offset from the current month. The original developer wasn't sure how many months would be correct for their application, and wanted to experiment. This was their solution: hard-code a list that's longer than you'd reasonably want, and take the FirstN, changing N until it looks right.

Of course, "generating a sequential list of numbers of a certain length" is one of those infamous solved problems. In the case of Power FX, it's solved via the sequence function. Sequence(17, 0) would accomplish the same result.

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