Project Awful

I’m a big fan of software that provides dubious or negative value. This page is in honor of that idea. I’ll link to anything I’ve made that’s Awful, and anything I’ve found from other people that I find particularly uninspiring. If you have software you’d like to see here, let me know and I’ll see if I think it belongs here.

Honorary mention: The Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon

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Criteria

Code doesn’t have to meet all of these criteria. In fact, meeting just one substantially well and Awfully is sufficient to put it here. So what are these criteria?

• Value to society. Is the program pointless? If so, it’s a good candidate.
• Accomplishes its goal. Anyone can write a program that doesn’t work. For software to be Awful, it has to at least basically work sometimes.
• Uses pointer hacking or does other, similarly stupid things.
• Steamrolls errors or rewrites its own code. The Wheeler Jump is a good example of what I’m getting at here.
• Shows code to the user, fails to work under random conditions, has Awful error messages, or otherwise shows sloppy implementation details to the user.
• Code Golf. The less characters it took to write, the ~better~Awfuller, generally speaking. A bigger codebase is more prone to bugs, true, but it’s also likely to have better error handling. And error handling is not Awful.
• Code Quality. The less readable the code is, the better. For example, a crappy program may be bad, but a crappy program written in Ook is really awful.
• Malicious Compliance. Technically complying with best practices in order to make itself less readable or functional is an Awful thing.
• “You’re holding it wrong”. Changes whether it works well or poorly based on seemingly random differences in how it’s used.

What ISN’T Awful?

I haven’t found any software that isn’t at least a little bad. But to be Awful requires something more. So I’m going to make a list of things that aren’t awful.

• Stupid or generally ugly UI.
• Generally unhelpful error messages.
• Random crashes (unless comedically timed or caused)
• Generally crappy code.

Project Awful!

fuckit.py

fuckit.py. The Python Error Steamroller. Anything I write won’t do it justice, so just go check it out.

Criteria	Status
Value to society	Actively makes code worse.
Accomplishes its Goal	It steamrolls errors all right.
Stupid Things	Live edits the call stack and rewrites the syntax tree.
Steamrolling	Literally called “the Python error steamroller”.
Detail Exposure	Screws up stack traces sometimes, nothing too Awful though.
Code Golf	183 significant lines at time of writing. Not bad. Pretty Awful, really.
Code Quality	Pylint rates it at a 6.7/10. Readable. Uses too many best practices IMO.
Malicious Compliance	None really.
You’re holding it wrong	The author actively fixes problems when people report them.

 

NoColon

nocolon. Removes the need to use colons in Python, because colons are unpythonic.

Criteria	Status
Value to society	Pointless.
Accomplishes its Goal	Does its job, but doesn’t work in some specific conditions.
Stupid Things	Live edits code as it’s being imported.
Steamrolling	No steamrolling used.
Detail Exposure	N/A
Code Golf	52 significant lines at time of writing. Good job!
Code Quality	Pylint rates it at a 4/10. Readable. No code comments.
Malicious Compliance	Makes fun of the idea of being “pythonic” by doing stupid, unpythonic things.
You’re holding it wrong	Just doesn’t work in lots of edge cases.

 

SiriSings

It may be a bit of a faux pas to promote my own stuff here, but damn it I’m proud. SiriSings is a command line app for mac that allows you to put in words and have a siri-like voice sing a song found based on those words. You can install it with pip install https://sosheskaz.github.io/pypi/sirisings.zip

Criteria	Status
Value to society	Creates unpleasant sounds.
Accomplishes its Goal	Works pretty well, doesn’t work right sometimes.
Stupid Things	Disables warnings using the shebang.
Steamrolling	Performs no checking of whether or not the song it found is actually singable.
Detail Exposure	Will sometimes “sing” HTML tags to the listener when it screws up.
Code Golf	54 significant lines at time of writing. Good job!
Code Quality	Pylint rates it at a 10/10. Readable. Intentionally bad whitespacing.
Malicious Compliance	Uses technical compliance with PEP-8 to make it less readable.
You’re holding it wrong	Doesn’t work for instrumentals or seemingly random, specific songs.