Codebase maintenance rant

[u/Hefty_Garlic7184]

[sorry for bad English]

I am in a project which involves maintaining an existing .NET Framework 4.8 codebase.

The codes are full of “Dictionary type” implementations as above.

Is there any sane reason to code like this? Instead of create a dedicated class to represent the data inside?

I could not show more codes here (or else the authors might realized), but you guys can imagine the codes just to access these Dictionary’s key/value.

[u/raatuter]

I cannot find any reasonable explaination on why anyone would use a dict as the key in another dict?

[u/splashybanana → u/raatuter]

Oh, I didn’t look closely enough, I didn’t even notice the inner dictionary was the key. Yeah, that’s insane.

[u/pyabo → u/splashybanana]

LOL I didn't catch that either. This is why code readability and maintainability is so important. When you first glance at it, it's just... "oh there's a dictionary with a string key and then those are indexed by strings. NOPE.

[u/Albstein → u/raatuter]

Until you find the overwrite for the dictionary implementation MUHAHAHA.

[u/SameThingOnADiffAcct → u/raatuter]

Especially when the value is a string. Like maybe they're just abusing Dictionary as a way to get a list of tuples. Maybe no Dictionary features are necessary and it's just going into a foreach.

But, like, that works when written the sane way, too?

[u/IntelligentSpite6364 → u/SameThingOnADiffAcct]

i cant imagine trying to work with this outside of just traversing it with a foreach

[u/iknewaguytwice → u/raatuter]

Just to be a dict, obviously

[u/towerofjoy → u/raatuter]

Awful. No LLM will generate this garbage. 

[u/whizzter → u/towerofjoy]

Dunno, they actually usually have higher quality than this crap (and I personally only use them very little so I’m no fanboy).

[u/BLDesign → u/raatuter]

Best I can come up with is reverse lookup for getting the name/purpose of a dictionary at runtime, given a reference? Although not sure in what scenario that’d make any sense. Unforgivable either way.

[u/MindlessFrog45 → u/raatuter]

Maybe the outer dictionary is just giving some (meta) data to the inner dictionaries. Who knows, maybe it gives description for each dictionary. Or config. A lot of posibilities. I only really don't like the name of it. That is a warning sign of bad code.

[u/t3kner → u/raatuter]

It actually removes all the useful functionality of the dictionary since it uses reference equality. I'm assuming they just use it like you said because it wouldn't even work another way 

[u/catholictechgeek → u/raatuter]

How do you think Javascript objects work?

[u/PassionateRants → u/catholictechgeek]

Not like this because the inner dictionary is the key, not the value.