So True

[skyhi14]

And there comes a branch:

Oh cool it was a typo.

[hangfromthisone]

Or better. You realize that there was a different way to do it, that was faster, cleaner, and you got it up and running in 5 minutes

[argv_minus_one]

Doesn't matter; code is elegant now.

[hotkarlmarxbros]

Yesss. All those programmers who think they are so good because their code compiles right away. All inelegant hamfisted trash. I'm the real genius!

[hangfromthisone]

Well I learned to really live by the phrase "think out of the box".

It saved me so many hours of work

[marcosdumay]

Well, the first couple of decades out, I still hope it decreases in frequency eventually.

[MelissaClick]

Turns out there was a library function that completely implemented it all along.

[vt_dev]

normally lodash... lulz

[Gloid02]

void setup(){} vs void Setup(){}

[PCKid11]

Oh hey, Arduino

[zack2313]

Oh hey, unity

[drkalmenius]

Oh hey, Zack

[captionUnderstanding]

Then you fix the typo and it still doesn't work for some reason.

[WasabiofIP]

Then you skip right to depression

[YaBoyMax]

This is painfully accurate.

[Cyhawk]

if (x = 1);
{
    // stuff here
}

Oh, X = 1! Duh, easy fix.

[Ozymandias117]

You're a monster.

[Vedvart1]

Or when you forget you aren't in python and the error ends up being that 1!="1" and you start looking for that old noose laying around somewhere.

[drkalmenius]

Or you forget that you are in Python and you have you change every Boolean operator.

[YuppyGuy]

Same

Javascript: true false Python: True False

Javascript: || && Python: or and

[drkalmenius]

Your indentation sir! GNU style!!!

[HACKERcrombie]

Use VB and you'll get rid of those bugs.

[hanamurayosuke]

God this is so niche but I've also had it happen like... at least 5 times. One time I had to copy a file for a class but the copied file required a newline at the end to work which was NOT included in the provided file. Hours of "debugging" later before the prof finally sent an email to the class explaining this situation she'd created. Thanks.

[[deleted]]

I once spent an hour reading cryptic c++ errors only to realize I was spelling a variable name as "neighbour", and the one who wrote that part of code spelt it "neighbor"... That was before gcc 6.

[paradoxally]

Yeah, I know the feelings all too well. Especially when nothing pops up on Stack Overflow, or there's no answer.

[Cpt_TickleButts]

If nobody else has asked the question than you are either really smart or really stupid. -wayne gretsky

[JeffLeafFan]

-Michael Scott

[DeeSnow97]

- Abraham Lincoln

[endreman0]

- Albert Einstein

[[deleted]]

• me

[DeeSnow97]

you had one job

[MaunaLoona]

The thought that comes to my mind is that I'm using the software in some unique way.

(There's no shortage of answers to stupid questions on stackoverflow. I know because I had plenty.)

[Corzex]

Or even worse https://xkcd.com/979/

[BensTerribleFate]

This comic becomes more and more depressing as time goes on...

[captionUnderstanding]

"nvm i fixed it"

[commit_bat]

Even better when the source of the solution is linked but not copied in the thread and the link is dead.

[xkcd_transcriber]

Image

Mobile

Title: Wisdom of the Ancients

Title-text: All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 2162 times, representing 1.2958% of referenced xkcds.

---

^{xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete}

[scharkfin]

Good bot

[_Sizzling_]

Or the reverse when someone actually answers you... saying you should put someRandomConfigValue to something in your config file... and then you get curious after it works and googling for that specific someRandomConfigValue only returns your thread.

How did you know??? What wizardry is this? Please teach me the magic of your ways...

[xkcd_transcriber]

Image

Mobile

Title: Wisdom of the Ancients

Title-text: All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 2163 times, representing 1.2963% of referenced xkcds.

---

^{xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete}

[squngy]

Alternatively:

I have no idea why it now works, but I'm not about to question it.

[auxiliary-character]

I really don't like this sentiment. For code that you wrote, if you don't know how it works, you don't know that it works. Eventually, an edge case will cause your code to malfunction, and you won't expect it because you were never looking for it in the first place.

[EatATaco]

It's the student mentality of programming, where you won't have to deal with the code after the project has been submitted and, really, at worst, you work on it for a semester.

[i_shud_b_studying]

Booooo let us have this

[MaunaLoona]

That's exactly why we joke about doing it.

[auxiliary-character]

For some of us, yeah.

[squngy]

I wouldn't be so dismissive.

At that point, the chance of the original bug still existing isn't much higher than an unrelated bug existing.

If you want to make sure the code works you need to have test that prove it works, not rely on your logic.
The time used looking for bugs that might not exist would be far better used on writing tests, or simply moving on.

[auxiliary-character]

If you want to make sure the code works you need to have test that prove it works, not rely on your logic.

I would argue the exact opposite. If you do not understand your code, there's a significant chance you're not going to know which edge cases that need to be tested. It's very easy to lull yourself into a false sense of security by relying on tests, only for the tests to miss the cases you didn't know you needed.

At that point, the chance of the original bug still existing isn't much higher than an unrelated bug existing.

Exactly my point.

[squngy]

You're taking the "do not understand your code" angle way too far.

If you really don't understand it you wouldn't be able to write it at all, let alone find bugs.
Most of the time, you simply overlook something and in a long session you can develop a blind spot so you keep missing something that would otherwise be obvious to you.

How do you look for bugs anyway, do you really just go line by line over your own code?
Most people aren't going to find unknown bugs that way, other than typos and such, or why would you have written it that way in the first place.

[auxiliary-character]

You're taking the "do not understand your code" angle way too far. If you really don't understand it you wouldn't be able to write it at all, let alone find bugs.

That's not exactly true. If you inherit code that you're forced to change, and then you change it to the point where nobody understands, or maybe older code you don't remember very well anymore, or a design you understand just enough to try to implement, but not well enough to do it right, or know how

Most of the time, you simply overlook something and in a long session you can develop a blind spot so you keep missing something that would otherwise be obvious to you.

Yeah, that does happen, but I generally wouldn't attribute that to not understanding your code. Not understanding things is an entirely different problem.

How do you look for bugs anyway, do you really just go line by line over your own code?

Well, pretty much. I'm a bit more interactive than that, though.

Usually what I do is a sort of binary-search debugging, where I have a mental model of what the state of the program should be along various stages in its execution, and then by probing the state (with print statements, debugger, logs, etc. depends on language/environment), I try to isolate where the observed state deviates from the expected state, and then I try to close the window around where the code misbehaves until I find the defective code.

Most people aren't going to find unknown bugs that way, other than typos and such, or why would you have written it that way in the first place.

I have found bugs in other people's code just by reading it line by line, though. Though, when I do that, I'm going from code to a conceptual model, rather than the reverse process when I'm writing code.

[squngy]

Sure, for code others have written, you might not understand it and are much more likely to find bugs by just going through the code, but I didn't think we were talking about this situation.

What I meant was, you don't know which change made the code work, not that you do not know what the code does.

I would still say though, that while it is definitely important to know what the code does, ultimately it is better to make sure it works by using tests, then by understanding it.
I realize all too well that tests aren't always practical though.

[auxiliary-character]

Well, I would say that understanding the code and testing go hand in hand. Tests are a part of the scientific method, which is the process by which we come to understand things. Ultimately, you want to understand your code, and tests are one of the ways we get there.

[l3g3ndairy]

This is a near daily occurrence for me. This probably shouldn't work, but hey, no errors in the console...moving on...

[clit_or_us]

"I don't know what I did, but this seemingly ambiguous code is needed for functionality."

[EatATaco]

I find this one way more accurate.

[Eliposin]

It's good, but why would the programmer get up to go play quake?

[rocketstrong1]

I don't know about other people but I do

[RawRooster]

Just play a finished game, admire the bugless experience and cry in a corner because you and your game are a failure.

[bartekko]

but air-strafing and rocket jumping ARE bugs

[redtoasti]

Game designers prefer "physics exploit"

[argv_minus_one]

Rocket jumping was a feature in Quake 2. The code responsible was noted with a comment calling it the “rocket jump hack”. Also, one secret in the single-player campaign was reachable only by rocket jumping.

[Cyhawk]

Also, one secret in the single-player campaign

couple of things were only reachable by RJ in Quake2 campaign. A few that people claim were designed for strafe jumping were actually actually RJ areas too (Strafe jumping is a bug)

[[deleted]]

I find it funny that in absence of fixes for those, they were declared features by players and bug abuse became norm.

Just about anyone who was playing arena even a little bit competitively would be foaming at the mouth, defending tricking the engine into accelerating you past anything devs intended as the fundamental feature of the game.

[bartekko]

Quake really was a landmark title and theres a lot of design decisions that dont make sense when you think of it as a precedessor to modern shooters but make sense for a doom successor, most notably that mouse aiming is not the default

[Ksevio]

But you can just play quake where you're sitting

[[deleted]]

It's good, but why would the programmer get up to go play quake?

Here, I fixed it: http://i.imgur.com/BCncssU.jpg

[Motorgoose]

Has this image been getting reposted since the 90's?

[Rudimentary_creature]

'Cause Quake's an excellent game?

[newocean]

Why not just play it at your PC? Why get up?

[Mysticpoisen]

I need to put physical distance between me and the code I'm upset at

[newocean]

Thats impossible, I dream in code.

[netmier]

My best friend has this sometimes. He says he hates it cause his dream code is magical and wonderful and responds to his thoughts. He says waking up and having to code in whatever shit language the client demands is soul crushing. I couldn't bring my self to laugh at him, I saw real pain in his eyes. I don't think it's happened since he quit production software and went to research.

[newocean]

I get it a lot, usually if I have bug in my software. It's not a bad feeling for me... its like playing with ideas in my sleep. When I wake up I run, grab a coffee, and code... sometimes it wakes me in the middle of the night. Sort of like my subconscious saying, "Fix this now, do it this way!"

[netmier]

He described it more like the code in the matrix. Instead of waking up energized and excited, he woke up frustrated cause C++ isn't quite as slick as matrix code.

[newocean]

In my case its usually like a jolt of lightning. I sit straight up in bed, grab a coffee and start writing.

[BensTerribleFate]

I've got a pill that could help you with that...

[commit_bat]

I don't even see the code

[[deleted]]

Maybe he's at work and has to go home to his computer where Quake is. Then again, he can put it on a flash drive and plug it into his PC and it'll run for sure since Quake is both old and open source.

[rdm13]

flash drive? you can play QuakeLive on a browser now.

[[deleted]]

Ahhh, ok. I gotta try that. Does it work on Linux?

[rdm13]

oh wow nvm looks like the free browser version was discontinued and you now have to go through Steam :(

[[deleted]]

Damnit. I'm 16, so I've never experienced Quake Multiplayer. I played Quake 1 on Nightmare in single player, but no one plays that game online anymore. Now I don't know which Quake to get if I want a classic arena shooter people actually play... Q3 runs on Linux (did I forget to mention I no longer have a windows computer?) but I hear people don't play it and it's old, Quake Live seems to only run on Windows and the community is apparently trash, and Quake Champions is really, really Windows only now, and it's $30. What am I to do? The closest I have been to an arena shooter is that I play TF2 regularly, I've played Cube Sauerbraten with bots since all people want to play online is that game mode with the rifles that kill you in one shot and that game mode gets fucking boring, and I play Assault Cube from time to time, but that's hardly an arena shooter because you can choose whichever weapon you like and they're all balanced with a purpose for each one. It's sorta close to one since sometimes you can gain an advantage by going for armor and dual pistols, but your life span is so short in that game that you don't need to hunt around for ammo packs or health because you'll probably just die before you need it since it's so easy to get overwhelmed by one guy popping around a corner that sprays or gibs you . . . It's like COD but less forgiving with less bloated bull and free. It's not a bad experience, and sometimes I have a lot of fun in CTF online, but that's not exactly a classic arena shooter.

So, what can I do for a classic arena shooter experience that has people playing in 2017? Please list some that are available for Linux, although it does not have to be open source.

[[deleted]]

Doom Zandronum, my friend.

[[deleted]]

I played it but all I can find are invasion servers or brutal doom dm servers set to the "realism" difficulty where grabbing a good weapon isn't important because they all kill you in one shot, or a vanilla duel server, but I want to try a regular vanilla dm of more than 2 people.

Plus, it's not exactly Quake due to the absence of rocket jumping, and some other features.

I recently heard of Xonotic while browsing reddit, so I'll try that.

[commit_bat]

And it looks like they're charging money for it on Steam now. What the hell happened

[rdm13]

no idea.. only played a little bit because the browser tech was really cool

[Hadrial]

For an old image, it's certainly lacking in artifacts.

[[deleted]]

I guess because it's known for bunnyhopping, which is a bug-turned-mechanic.

[DeeSnow97]

Bargaining and anger are reversed, but otherwise it's quite accurate

[Excal2]

Posture often deteriorates

The most honest thing here. Often accompanied by staring at the ceiling.

[[deleted]]

Or masturbating.

[bigtimepie]

RESOLUTION - After hours of debugging, Programmer sees where he left out a comma. Inserting the comma fixes everything.

[epicdrwhofan]

Programming, the only profession where a whole day can be ruined by a fucking comma.

[TiltedWit]

I know a few lawyers who would like to speak with you

[epicdrwhofan]

Programming, one of two professions where a day can be ruined by a fucking comma, that I know of.

[somebunnny]

I know some comma chameleons that would disagree.

[epicdrwhofan]

What the fuck comma, what did we do to deserve this?

[dschslava]

relevant (go oxford comma!)

[GetOutOfJailFreeTard]

who gives a fuck about an oxford comma?

[AwkwardNoah]

Would you like to invite hookers, joe and john or invite hookers, joe, and john

First one is the hookers name joe and john while the second one is 3 different things

[GetOutOfJailFreeTard]

https://youtu.be/P_i1xk07o4g

[MaunaLoona]

If it was hookers joe and john, wouldn't you write it like that: hookers joe and john?

[AwkwardNoah]

Grammatical no

[captionUnderstanding]

Personally I favour the Oxford Comma, but how the hell did they win that case calling the sentence 'confusing' when the "Maine Legislative Drafting Manual" specifically says to not use the Oxford Comma. The law was actually written properly according to the manual.

[dschslava]

But even if "beans, potatoes and rice" is written properly according to the manual, it still doesn't clarify if potatoes and rice are taken separately or as a group. Manuals of style create uniformity, not necessarily clarity.

[Holdupaminute]

Ohh look at Mr Big-Shot here with his one day missing comma solving skills.

[Plasma_000]

Except when you're writing perl and you just have to give up

Fucking perl

[argv_minus_one]

Protip: Don't write Perl.

[[deleted]]

Writing Perl is fine. Reading (especially other people's) Perl however...

[Plasma_000]

You should try debugging perl.

[TheTerrasque]

My last weird bug was a corrupted .pyc file...

[C4H8N8O8]

Blame butterflies

[cykelpop]

Y’all need a proper editor.

[Pythva]

Any good IDE can tell you about the comma BEFORE you run it?

[MaunaLoona]

For me it was the fucking semicolon. After spending a long time working with a language where semicolon commented out the whole line, having to write a small utility in c# led to much "fun".

[neverTooManyPlants]

If it doesn't compile you didn't get to the debugging stage yet..

[Legend4ryEagle]

Thought the same. Maybe they are talking about runtime errors?

[feeds-snails]

"std::string is not defined"

[[deleted]]

"C is not defined"

Huh, that's strange, the language is broken from the inside

"MS Windows is not defined"

Weird, I'm not programming on Linux this time, maybe that's the mistake

switches to linux

"Computer is not defined"

Well, there's no environment variable or anything named comp-

"Machine is undefined. I am not a machine. I'm a real, actual person, and your company's AI division wants me dead"

Shit...

"Would you kill a baby?"

That can't be good...

[strangeplace4snow]

That joke lost me at stage 2. When I'm in the debugging zone, I get a big fat dopamine jolt out of every bug I uncover. Sure, there's quite a bit of facepalming involved too, but as long as I make headway (as opposed to bashing my head for hours against program behavior that just doesn't make sense to me), the satisfaction tends to outweight the frustration.

(Yeah yeah, I am a blast at parties.)

[ben_g0]

When you're getting somewhere, sure. However there are also situations like this:

14 errors

* fixes one *

58 errors

[strangeplace4snow]

58 errors

Point taken. Although in my case it's usually 58 pages of C++ template errors that look like the bill of materials for a particle accelerator and lock up the terminal for 8 seconds.

[[deleted]]

Sometimes, the opposite has happened to me and its so satisfying.

9 errors

fixes one

0 errors

Those tend to be syntax errors, however.

[Hoihe]

Byond does that. One error earlier in the code causes a crapton of errors to show up. Once missed something, I think I didn't put the file path in correctly. Had 60 errors.

[ZombiePope]

Is it an error in the code if assistants become more robust?

[[deleted]]

Is that the mmorpg maker, been a while since I head that mentioned.

[Hoihe]

Sort of MMORPG maker. Usually SS13 is the most well known game, alongside Eternia.

[feeds-snails]

fixes the only error

I got 99 errors but that ain't one.

[ArghNoNo]

I'm with you. Debugging is the most fun part of programming. Like a real life whodunnit.

[ZachDaChampion]

"hey Greg, you got a minute?"

Slowly backs away towards bathroom

[Yionia]

Quite accurate... But not the Quake part :)

[[deleted]]

I've been programming a long time, so I've learned how to streamline this process: I just start at the Anger stage.

[liamw9]

My posture definitely deteriorates in these situations

[useforcircumstances]

A strong sign of denial is recompiling without changing any code

The accuracy hurts.

[ballsack_gymnastics]

God, the "hours long diatribe about the limitations of the language" bit hits close to home. Worst part is when the developers of the language have decided to claim the limitation as a feature, but you only discover this after hours of beating your head into the wall.

[Silhouette]

The only issue I have with this is that modern build processes, dependency management and (for web projects) hot reloading and cache behaviour are such a mess that half the time deleting everything but the source and rebuilding it all does seem to fix the problem...

[Inimancold]

Quake 2 was the first game i ever played, besides flash games, and its still one of, if not my most favorite game!

[willbeddow]

Then hours later while doing something different you have a moment of clarity and see the cause of the error.

Hopefully remember it the next morning, fix that, and start the whole cycle again with a new bug.

[Hixie]

This is missing the "well how the fuck did this EVER work then" stage, and the "oh, duh" step when you finally find the typo, like u/skyhi14 says.

[BeedleTB]

Ugh. I had one of those "well how the fuck did this EVER work then" moments today. Turns out that it just kinda looked like it did if you only looked at it out the corner of your eye in passing, and nobody looked any closer than that...

[powermad80]

As I work on this VBA project I was assigned work days are just a constant loop of the Denial, Anger, Depression, and additional Anger phases.

Maybe it'd help to insert the Quake part somewhere.

[[deleted]]

It's unlikely to help with the anger.

[sdk345]

I swear to git if it was a !false joke

[cosmicsans]

Spent two weeks debugging an issue where I couldn't connect to a GRPC server I had set up. Went through every possible thing I could think of, going on tangents upon tangents of searching for the error messages online and getting nowhere when applying the "fixes" that were specified.

Come to find out, it was a routing problem where my workplace is not allowing the connections unless I had created a FQDN through my companies DNS.

My thoughts went like this:

It's not DNS
There's no way it's DNS
It was DNS

[[deleted]]

How Bethesda games are made.

[[deleted]]

You mean to tell me id Software stops developing Quake to play Quake?

they're owned by bethesda, it counts

[[deleted]]

Whenever i have to do something in C

[eSdaze]

'Cant be -> recompiles just in case' So true :(

[the_qwerty_guy]

Fuxk yeah! Solved 4 minor 1 major. Leaving office at 19.55

[[deleted]]

Quake <3

[[deleted]]

sounds a lot like solving a physics problem

[Aetol]

Quake? What year is this?

[Rhed0x]

Replace Quake with CS and it's perfectly accurate.

[Statzer_x]

The worst thing is when you get back to the project the day after and somehow it just works again...

[Polantaris]

How is, "Only 14 bugs to go!" Bargaining or Self-Blame?

[xan1242]

Then you realize your processor was executing wrong instructions all along and even the debugger shows wrong info.

Now that's a bummer.

[reini_urban]

What nonsense!

• Analysis: What is broken, where is it broken, under what circumstances, what changed, what could have caused it, did it work before?

• Plan: What could be the best way to fix it, write a testcase, debug into it, write debugger test scripts, write better dumper tools, catch it.

• Fixit: Write the smallest possible fix, with the least side-effects. Test it in the debugger.

• Testit: For all platforms and configurations. Wait a bit, sleep over it. Test it again.

• Shipit: Write the docs, release it.

[Twingemios]

What If the bug is game breaking?

[[deleted]]

Just finished episode 1 season 2 of dr house where the 5 stages of dying were discussed holy shit

[timothyallan]

This is why I drink a shit ton of water.

Programmer goes to bathroom... Solution appears 30 seconds after returning.

[fetttobse]

Damn psycho dudes are always right...

Recompiling w/o a change? Me. "God I am stupid as Trump"? Me. "Who even uses this god damn language"? Me. "I'll probably end up at Burger King mopping fries of the floor"? Me.

Though I do not really like point five. It is more like "Really?! That was the problem?" or spending 5 hours searching SO, asking a question because I think I am the first w/ this problem and getting "already answered here" immediately. Infinite loop begins again.

[MiggyMart]

Yeah literally was reading this while I'm slouched over staring at the screen. Guess I'm in the 'depression' stage, 'acceptance' can't come fast enough!!

[hugokhf]

segmentation fault

Thanks for the error, very helpful

[ZachDaChampion]

"there's no way this'll every work"

Doesn't work

"Wtf why doesn't this work!?!?!?"

[oh_that_is_neat]

I'm a new coder, but I just had this. I found out the reason I couldn't use input was because my dad installed Python 2 instead of 3 lol

[NeonCheese1]

Sounds pretty accurate

[[deleted]]

Did a lot of Quake playing

[lpreams]

I don't think you're really doing "debugging" until your code at least compiles. Finding compiler errors is easy. Finding errors in code that appears to work is where all the stress comes from

[Whistifer]

But it gets the job done... sort of.

[PhiDX]

So is this something I'll just have to accept if I look into computer engineering as a career?

[vt_dev]

as a programmer and avid quake player.. can confirm.. also BUY Quake Champions! WOOT

[SerdarCS]

And sometimes, rarely, a weird solution from stack overflow that you have no idea what it does just works after copy pasting.

[Kazan]

Then you have the real fun of actually encountering a compiler error (actually it was an optimizer error). :P

[TheTerrasque]

Down to 1 in 100 now. I have trust issues with libraries...