Programming

Software developers are stupid morons!

I have worked as one for couple of decades, so take my word for it. I know quite a few of them. Stupid morons, software developers and people who are both.

The reason for my rant is this JavaScript bugger:

var t = /^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i;

It keeps popping up constantly. For people not familiar with regular expressions, that is a piece of code to match a valid e-mail address as specified by the one and only, original specification for ARPA Internet Text Messages, which we call e-mail today. As I keep insisting, software developers have major deficit both on writing proper code and testing their writtern code. For non-software developers: the reason that ill written line of code has spread around the internet like autumn flu, is that people just google for the regexp and copy/paste it into their product without thinking it for a second. It worked last time, right?

Here are the facts:
This is the list of IANA approved top-level-domains: http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt in plain-text format. The list contains 1115 domains at the time of this vent. 570 of them are longer than 4 chars as limited by the above piece of crap. That results only 49% of valid TLDs being approved as valid ones. Anybody doing his/hers work only by 49% of success should be fired! Instantly.

Examples of valid TLDs:
As an example, the IANA list contains following domains: .cancerresearch, .xn--t60b56a, .international and .xn--vermgensberatung-pwb. The ones having lettersn XN, are internationalized domain names or IDNs. When decoded, .xn--c2br7g equals to नेट, .xn--t60b56a equals to 닷넷, both meaning .net in Hindi and Korean. Another ones are .xn--mgba3a3ejt for ارامكو, Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian Oil Company and .xn--vermgensberatung-pwb for .vermögensberatung, German for financial advice. All of them are fully valid, but not being validated by the ancient piece of copy/paste mess everybody seems to be using.

Some of the weaker players:
The idiot-of-the-year -award doesn't go to http://www.moonfruit.com/ or http://tunnus.yle.fi/ who are strong competitors using that relic of a validator. The obvious winner is https://www.startssl.com/, who have a hard-coded list of 2827 domains and subdomains, having only 464 of the TLDs in the IANA-list. 651 of them missing, matching only 42% of the valid ones. Idiots!

If you are a software developer and reading this: It's time to shape up! Stop doing your job poorly.