This meme was written by a novice that does not yet know true pain. An error that takes fifteen minutes to find! In your own code! Ha, you young whipper snapper… just wait until you have to debug an unforeseen edge case in a library… especially if it’s compiled. And once you’ve seen that, once you’ve known that horror, come and talk to me about DLL hell.
Unless you’re working with installers and, probably, in C++ it’s unlikely you’ll ever meet this Cthonic horror. Zalgo? Tony the Pony comes? You have met that friendly demon of development? They are but the apprentice… DLL hell is a span of time measured in days.
… Alternatively talk to me about trying to track down an extra newline at the end of a PHP file, that (against all advice) has a closing tag, that causes some output to be sent preventing you from sending headers to the client. There’s no error detection for that and PHP is an interpreted language… you just need to check files manually!
I spent 7 hours to debug why doubles in Java classes brick my class file parser only to discover the following small print in the specification after I read the corresponding OpenJDK source code: In retrospect, making 8-byte constants take two constant pool entries was a poor choice. Yeah no shit. I chose to write a custom user stylesheet for Oracle specifications to enlarge notes since they’re obviously critical to the implementation of JVMs. I guess the technical writers at Oracle didn’t want to offend the developers who wrote the JVM originally at the expense of developers who write JVMs today.
It’s 2023. If you’re not using an IDE or a highly extensible text editor with simple static analysis features, I really don’t know what to tell you.
I had to read it repeatedly and check if it really said “syntax error”. What will those people do if they encounter their first race condition?
Well, what most of us do… manage to reproduce it by chance one out of twenty attempts and then remove any evidence that you managed to trigger it and mark the ticket “unable to reproduce”. Bury the ticket by removing any good tags or keywords and hope it’s at least three months until anyone else reports the error so you can repeat the dance.
They insert sleep(1) and print statements. No shit. I had to fix this in two projects. One was a complete rewrite.
There are way too many Notepad enthusiasts out there.
Dynamically typed/interpreted language?
Python Yup that checks out.
I’ve never understood why so many languages insist on a feature that causes such a obtuse and tedious programming experience.
Python is great, until you don’t remember a function call, and can’t guess using your LSP to tell you. :/
