My biggest problem isn’t discovering my own crime. It’s trying to determine what my motive was at the time.
“I plead insanity”
Usually my motive is, “It’s 3am I’ll just put this temp placeholder here and fix it in the morning.”
Proceeds to not fix it due to forgetting by the morning
You’re sure that there was a crime? You’re fortunate that your bug is consistently reproducible.
My “favorite” is when following the steps to reproduce a specific bug you get an entirely different bug then what was reported
Actually think about that shit when I’m trying to sleep
Alleged crime.
Git blame would like to have a word with you.
Image Transcription: YouTube Comment
@davidm.313
“Debugging. The game where you are the criminal, the victim, and the detective at the same time. But you probably don’t know where the crime took place, or what it was. But there definitely is a crime.”
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Good human.
Hey. Sometimes the bug is in a third party library. I didn’t do it. I swear!
I know there’s a crime because my code runs, but it doesn’t do what I asked it to do.
The fact that it runs means that it has something delinquent to it. Otherwise it wouldn’t run. Better run after it and catch it. /j
(That was a bad pun and I am not sorry. It’s 3 am here and I can’t sleep. This helped me to burn a minute. Thank you.)
Its usually a typo lol
thank god that there’s a print function in every language.
The worst is when you’re print statements aren’t outputting where you expected them to, and you have no idea where they’re outputting to.
I tought myself programming as a kid in the 80s and 90s, and just got used to diagnostic print statements because it was the first thing that occurred to me and I had no (advanced) books, mentors, teachers, or Internet to tell me any different.
Then in university one of my lecturers insisted that diagnostic prints are completely unreliable and that we must always use a debugger. He may have overstated the case, but I saw that he had a point when I started working on the university’s time-sharing mainframe systems and found my work constantly being preempted and moved around in memory in the middle of critical sections. Diagnostic prints would disappear, or worse, appear where, in theory, they shouldn’t be able to, and they would come and go like a restless summer breeze. But for as much as that lecturer banged on about debuggers, he hardly taught us anything about how to use them, and they confused the hell out of me, so I made it through the rest of my degree without using debuggers except for one part of one subject (the “learn about debuggers” part).
Over 20 years later, after a little professional work and a lot of personal projects and making things for other non-coding jobs I’ve had, I still haven’t really used debuggers much. But lately I’ve been forcing myself to use them sometimes, partly to help me pick apart quirks in external libraries that I’m linking, and partly because I’d like to start using superscalar instructions and threading in my programs, and I remember how that sort of thing screwed up my diagnostic prints in university.
Even worse is when print statements cause the bug…
That was me before discovering interrupt safe print functions.
I’m not sure if this is a direct quote from Your Code as a Crime Scene, but it’s a good book and takes this same stance!
You could technically do this just like how GTA Vs gameplay was with all the different characters.
Well, seems like coding while drunk didn’t help this time.
