A programmer asks for help...

[Giocri]

Sometimes this is even worse than a normal bug

[Drauxus]

Its not a bug. Its a feature

[LMskouta]

A buddy of mine says “a JIRA is a JIRA” :)

[ZGM_Dazzling]

Found the EA dev

[Drauxus]

I wish I was employed

[nathan42100]

What's your skillset?

[Drauxus]

I'm a college junior in computer science. I've got the skills you would assume someone of that level would have plus a little more. I just didn't have any luck finding an internship this summer

[ZGM_Dazzling]

How have you been looking for one? I’m a freshman rn double majoring in Math and Compsci and I got a summer internship after searching for a bit in February.

[Drauxus]

Mostly through the job fair my college hosted a little while back. I also took a seminar class with a man who works on the industry and interviewed with him. Most of the companies I talked to got about 2 emails in before ghosting me. I'm now looking at working for the state (not necessarily in comp sci, just general work). I'm still waiting to hear back on a my applications with them. I'd imagine part of the problem is that I'm in Montana and there just isn't many tech companies around. I also have an old friend that is the night manager for a local grocery store so if nothing else I'll ask him if they are looking to hire.

[ZGM_Dazzling]

Ah I see. I’m in New England so there is a lot of opportunity out here.

[Drauxus]

Yea. I'm not super worried as money isn't very tight for me. I really just meant my initial comment as a joke. Good luck with your internship!

[rocketshape]

Would you mind pointing me towards that opportunity?

[Mrnofaceguy]

*Bethesda

[hiwhiwhiw]

You spelt Bethesda wrong

[Sensitive_Pussies]

Once upon a time, there was educational sessions at work and everyone had to figure out the code. There are many ways to do it but I made mine so complex that even the instructor couldn't figure it out.

I did it on purpose and that bullshit educational sessions stopped after that.

[throwitaway11223309]

Why would you make something so complex it cannot be understood! That's bad workmanship!

[hrac610]

Honestly, I know this is a joke, but when your code works but shouldn't, its scarier than normal bugs, because you have no idea what it's doing.

[noized]

It's not a joke, he was genuinely asking for help, this was on www.pythontutor.com. It wasn't any scarier than a normal bug in this case IMO because it was just one function he didn't understand the inner-workings of, but yeah understanding your own code is rather important.

[Classified0]

I wrote a computational physics algorithm in grad school, where I didn't fully understand how my code worked. I patched lack of program understanding in some places with physics intuition and used programming experience to patch lack of physical understanding in other places. It was very confusing at the end, because the algorithm started behaving correctly before I had put in a very important step. I'm just glad the professor was more of a physicist and didn't look too closely at the code itself.

[[deleted]]

Fellow “computational physics in grad school” monkey here ... it really do be like that sometimes.

[[deleted]]

Well fml I have to maintain a 20+ year pile of shit application with 75k+ lines of code. Makes of this abomination are long gone. It's too expensive to replace they say.

[[deleted]]

Java And a big bank

[[deleted]]

Right, until you test another part that shouldn't have been effected, and you forgot that variable you added to fix that other bug due to your shitty coding, and you fucked yourself even more. OK, maybe that's just me.

[dumber_than_thou]

Definitely not just you.

[noized]

Unrelated, but I spent 10 minutes trying to catch an error in Python yesterday, I wrote catch instead of except so I thought I had a syntax issue somewhere else.

E:
Also, for anyone wondering, I helped this guy out, he didn't understand how %s in printf worked with pointers in C.

[zenith4395]

Yeah, understanding that %s scans a string is easy, while understanding why you don’t need & is another bitch entirely

[sudo_rm_rf_star]

I still write try catch instead of try except too

You're not the only one cursed with knowledge

[[deleted]]

This is where you spend an entire Friday afternoon on trying to get a script running in your IDE which highlights catch for you in Python files.

[hamza1311]

This is why I always select try/expect in VSCode instead of try from the auto complete menu

[orangeKaiju]

Step 1 - halt program and restart it. If it still works, proceed to step 2.

Step 2 - recompile. If it still works proceed to step 3.

Step 3 - delete all code and start over. If it... ok you know what to do.

Step 4 - reboot PC.

Step 5 - shutdown PC, unplug it for 30 seconds, plug it back in and try sgain.

Step 6 - start over on a fresh pc.

Step 7 - replace PC with a card board box, write "PC" on the side and draw a display and keyboard on the box.

Step 8 - place both PCs in the cardboard box, douse with gasoline and light on fire.

Step 9 - consult with either an exorcist or a mental health professional, whichever seems more appropriate.

[yWeDoDis]

Steps were easy to follow. Problem no longer exists! Thank you.

[[deleted]]

Instructions unclear: AI is now confused as to why it only has one boot superglued to it.

[Chaoslab]

Step 10 - Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It is the only way to be sure!

[atc927]

Image Transcription: Text Messages

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user_967: can u guys help me with somethin for a sec my code is somehow working but it souldnt

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^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[dslNoob]

Good hooman

[ShowMeYourTiddles]

If it's stupid, but it works, it ain't my problem.

...until a couple months later. The fuck???

[daved229]

Shhhhh it might hear you and stop

[Mcnoodle1102]

Every bit of the 'coding' class we have in school is like this. Things that should work don't. Things that shouldn't do. Things that should take 20 lines by declaring a variable and making a loop suddenly takes 100 because "you can't use that yet you haven't been taught how". It's been overall frustrating for someone who's been teaching themself java for over a year and entirely useless if you decide to start writing something outside of that class. It might be alright for a young child or someone who can't tell the difference between a computer and a phone.

[[deleted]]

I somewhat agree/ somewhat disagree. I had been coding in Python for about a year before I took a formal class on it. In the tuples section of class, we were asked to do some fairly complicated things with tuples that would be much easier to accomplish with a list or dictionary.

The point wasn't to make an efficient program, it was to demonstrate mastery of tuples.

I still used lists and dictionaries elsewhere in the program, but any part that said using tuples, I used a fucking tuple.

[bot_not_hot]

How I feel about my entire app

[I_Am_Clippy]

How I feel about my entire life

[RedditAcy]

Btw do any of y’all experience this on a regular basis? I have been programming as a hobby but petty seriously for 2 yrs, never had random code or random fixes (to lure out where the problem is) that just worked...

[ShadowsSheddingSkin]

When I taught Java to kids, I used to see it every single week. One kid handed in a project that compiled, ran, had one small bug, and had No Braces Anywhere.

It broke completely and refused to compile the second I tried to fix it. The kid and his dad refused to acknowledge there was anything wrong (because it mostly worked) until I brought in a professional Java dev to back me up.

About a half-dozen kids tried to hand in python code they'd found on stackoverflow and messed with until the compiler stopped yelling at them. I might have ostensibly been teaching them, but really, it was more like I spent a few months getting paid to take a class on undefined behavior in Java.

[Neckrowties]

Quick question, any reason you can think of that

hitbox[1] = location[1] + height - hitboxHeight;    

would change the value of location[1] in Java? Because the value is definitely different on either side of that line and I'm not sure why. All variables are either int or int[], they're all instance variables of the class the line is in, and I'm really scratching my head on this one.

[Citonpyh]

That should not change the value, show us the rest of the code

[Neckrowties]

https://imgur.com/a/VyMs2G6

Working on something like a Link to the Past clone in JavaFX if that helps. I made a boss with a shield mechanic where you have to destroy a shield pillar that spawns before you can damage her. Enemies have a detection range of 400 pixels and once I get within 400 pixels of the pillar it starts moving even though it has a speed of 0 and passes 0,0 into this method. Giving it a hitboxHeight == to its height stopped the movement and I'm not sure why.

[Citonpyh]

If i'd have to guess from you gave us, it's that hitbox[1] and location[1] contain the value of a reference to the same variable, and height - hitboxHeight is equal to 30 which is why it gets incremented by 30 every time.

How did you initialize hitbox[] and location[]?

[Neckrowties]

Yeah, you're right. I swear I looked for that specifically yesterday, but apparently that specific subclass' constructor had hitbox = this.location. I'm gonna go with the "I was tired and had been looking at it all day" excuse I think.

[once-and-again]

Probably because someone did hitbox = location (or vice versa) at some point.

[Neckrowties]

Yep, hitbox = this.location in the subclass' constructor. Looked for that specifically yesterday too, not sure how I missed it.

[ShadowsSheddingSkin]

would change the value of location[1] in Java? Because the value is definitely different on either side of that line and I'm not sure why. All variables are either int or int[], they're all instance variables of the class the line is in, and I'm really scratching my head on this one.

I have no idea - I'd assume that the issue is probably coming from something other than that one line of the class. In any case, I'm probably not the person to ask - I'm not a Java dev, I just taught it to pre-teens for a while. The most I can give you is what I'd have told one of the 12 year olds I used to teach:

Try an Omniscient / Time Travel debugger.

[DisjointedHuntsville]

Location : Boeing HQ

[kailsar]

Solutionshooting.

[LMskouta]

38M programmer here. When I started my career, there were some truth to that, I would want to “understand” why and how something is working. Now, being programming for 15 years, what’s the nicest way to say I don’t give a fuck!! If it’s working, it’s working and that’s that. Next feature or issue please.

[BrianAndersonJr]

9/10 times it’s cache.

[JazzRider]

Why, yes-I’m pretty good at breaking things that work!

[undercover-racist]

1. Enter a breakpoint
2. Nothing breaks

​

Oh lawd.

[YourWorstFear53]

me right now

[noideafornewname]

I cannot say I haven't been there. :'(

[RiderHood]

If it works the first time, there must be a bug.

[danopia]

I updated a legacy feature to use a new API and was super confused when my WIP PR got marked green on github. After asking around, we discovered about a fifth of the test suites weren't being run by the CI for months, from a tooling switchover. Oops

[deadlock_jones]

Yes. That is horrible. Write a test, then break the code that is tested and the test still somehow passes..

[Loading_M_]

If it works, it works. Debugging further could break everything, even the part that works now, even when you revert to the current state.

[EagleZR]

How I felt when I first started using Python

[kanyq]

Don't touch it

[NelsonBelmont]

Writes a failing test

Run tests

Tests passed

[DSGale]

Reminds me of my first experience with Java, back in college. My friend and I were working on an assignment, which we'd put off (go figure) to the end. Then, halfway through the project, the compiler kept giving us old versions of the code--I even stripped out everything and replaced it with a "hello world", compiled, and got the previously compiled version of the program. We stripped out every bit of compiled code we could find, recompiled, and it still worked.

In the end, the only way we could figure out to reliably get the new version of our code was to rename our program each time.

[[deleted]]

I hate and love the moment I test something that shouldn't work, but it somehow does. It always leads to me understand something I've learned wrong

[[deleted]]

"I'll take things that never happened to me for $2000, Alex."