CodeSOD: Disable This

One of the first things anyone learns about object oriented programming is the power of inheritance and overriding functions. Isn't it great that you can extend or modify the implementation of a function in your derived classes? Don't you wish you could just do that for every function? Aash's co-worker certainly does.

@Overridepublic boolean isEnabled() { if (!super.isEnabled()) { return false; } return true;}

I think this is a beautiful little smear of bad code, because it's useless on multiple levels. First, we are calling a boolean function only to bury it in a conditional which does the exact same thing: return super.isEnabled() would do the job. But if our developer thought to do that, they'd instantly see that there's no point to adding an override- we're just doing what the super class does. The if is just enough to hide that from you if you're careless and not very bright.

And, before you ask, no, there never was any real functionality in this override, at least not that ever got checked into source control. It isn't a vestigial leftover of once useful code. It's just useless from birth.

[Advertisement] Continuously monitor your servers for configuration changes, and report when there's configuration drift. Get started with Otter today!