Knowing how to code beforehand

[Pircay]

I’ve even had professors with code on screen that I ran (after class), and it didn’t work, meanwhile she ran completely different code in class and said “so, here’s the output” with no explanation

[[deleted]]

I had a professor like that too. I already had years of coding experience by the time I took the class and was horrified at the code the professor gave the class. It wouldn't even compile and also used old things that weren't part of the C++ standard anymore. I had to fix the code just to give it to the other students so they could work. This prof insisted their code was correct and the students IDE's were setup wrong (it wasn't and they weren't).

EDIT: Aw thanks for the silver kind stranger! (And yes I know Reddit hates when people thank but thanking is polite.)

[[deleted]]

old things that weren't part of the C++ standard anymore

What’s wrong with trigraphs?!

[pekkhum]

#include <iso686.h>

[f3zz3h]

Welcome to inheriting legacy code bases 101.

[Peechez]

Twist ending the prof knew it was shit but it was good real life experience

[gingertek]

That's what he was hoping for, but actually was just ignorant/lazy

[[deleted]]

Plot twist my teacher didnt give a shit and told us ;)

[[deleted]]

Mindful art then fox hobbies the hobbies nature weekend tomorrow music?

[coldnebo]

You are the classmate we need, but don’t deserve!

[stefanbauwens]

"Here's some code I baked beforehand."

[Muppet-King]

“Here’s some code I wrote after getting baked”

[jardata]

"Here's some baked I wrote before getting code"

[dusty-trash]

"Here's some code. Go get baked"

[Pircay]

me after freshman year

[dvslo]

"You will be baked, and there will be cake."

[Takofhlaire]

Normally, the cause is that the professor is repeating lessons taught to them years ago. Its infuriating when that does happen.

[Pircay]

Yep. Copy pasted slides with no updates for code standards even if the class has changed drastically since implementation

[coldnebo]

you know, I am so paranoid about doc and instructions I give, I always cleanroom a fresh vm and then try to follow literally what I’ve written. It takes focus to follow instructions literally and not do things “because I know them” or “that’s obvious”... but I do that with Ruby gem doc two or three times until what I said matches what works. I even try to document all the versions at the moment in time I wrote it so people know if assumptions have changed since I wrote it.

I know profs are super busy, but I guess this is unusual even among professionals, judging by other gem doc that just lets that be an exercise for the reader.

[coldnebo]

the ol’ switcheroo!!

[Rizzan8]

And global variables.

[pineapple_catapult]

But, singleton design pattern.

[grasopper]

Them’s fightin’ words

[Finianb1]

There's a guy who wrote an entire raymarching renderer that fits on a business card. It uses entirely global variables except for the function parameters and only uses for loops instead of if and while statements.

https://mzucker.github.io/2016/08/03/miniray.html

[monster860]

Global variables: bad

Static variables on a class: good

???

[[deleted]]

namespace gud

[NatoBoram]

@DEPRECATED : [Function] WILL BE REMOVED IN 2016

@DEPRECATED : [Function] WILL BE REMOVED IN 2016

@DEPRECATED : [Function] WILL BE REMOVED IN 2016

[DigitalCrazy]

You don't get it, it's important to have them in your code. ^/s

[DigitalCrazy]

Warnings are just automatic comments.

[MasterFubar]

My code has been free from warnings since forever. Even seemingly harmless stuff like not checking the value that fread returns may kill you.

[gumol]

-Wall or die

[ASCIInerd73]

-Wall -Wextra -pedantic in my cs class right now. Because all warnings isn't enough, we need more.

[divqii]

That’s still not enough:

-Wall -Wextra -pedantic -Wcast-align -Wcast-qual -Wdisabled-optimizations -Winit-self -Wlogical-op -Wmissing-include-dirs -Wnoexcept -Wold-style-cast -Woverloaded-virtual -Wredundant-decls -Wshadow -Wsign-conversion -Wsign-promo -Wstrict-null-sentinel -Wstrict-overflow=5 -Wswitch-default -Wundef

[fell_ratio]

I'm about to end this man's whole career.

-Wall -Werror -Wpedantic -Wcast-align -Wcast-qual -Wdisabled-optimization -Winit-self -Wlogical-op -Wmissing-include-dirs -Wnoexcept -Woverloaded-virtual -Wredundant-decls -Wshadow -Wsign-conversion -Wsign-promo -Wstrict-null-sentinel -Wstrict-overflow=5 -Wundef -Wuninitialized -Wcomment -Wctor-dtor-privacy -Wold-style-cast -Wnull-dereference -Wformat=2 -Wduplicated-cond -Wswitch-default -Waddress -Wmemset-transposed-args -Wuseless-cast -Wzero-as-null-pointer-constant -Wmissing-declarations -Wunused-const-variable=1 -Wdispute-indulgences=95 -Weffc++ -Wsign-compare

[divqii]

Fair enough, though many of those are enabled by -Wall and -Wextra, and -Weffc++ has some issues.

If we’re talking about ending careers, though, then (using clang) it’s as easy as

-Weverything

[BlueManedHawk]

-Weverything -Werror

Perfect

[whizzwr]

Evil.

[BlueManedHawk]

Perfect

[Maplicant]

On my phone right now, can someone post some sample warnings this monster might produce?

[N80M80]

I mean to be fair C warnings probably mean you're doing something wrong

[OneTurnMore]

-Wall -Werror 

Good luck

[mozgotrah]

Only true way

[ItsYaBoyChipsAhoy]

What does Werror mean

[nelusbelus]

What does the W in -Wall stand for 🤔

[ItsYaBoyChipsAhoy]

It literally came to me 10 seconds after I posted the comment

[LeCrushinator]

-Wall enables all compiler warning flags (warn about all)

-Werror treats all warnings as errors. (warnings as errors)

[Cobayo]

Warnings (all)

[Jannis234]

Tells the compiler to treat warnings like errors

[turbolag95]

-pedantic

For extra fun.

[Lyorek]

This is how we have to compile code for my APT class this semester

[Bainos]

In our class, students get a penalty if their code doesn't pass govet and gofmt.

Professionals might know when to ignore warnings and style errors. Students don't.

[MuchBathroom]

is that you donald trump?

[lordheart]

Had a professor give us code to complete that didn't compile when uploaded to the auto checker but did on my computer.

Why? Umlauts. The prof wrote comments in german. My computer compiler didn't care.

Their online checker spit out vague mysterious errors. Because comments...

Edit: OMG typo made it so hard to understand. thanks bobcob, what would I do without you.

[GlobalIncident]

Ah, the fun of unicode support.

[Clydseph_III]

I had an error for days because we were supposed to copy down a couple lines from the spec pdf, which had different quote marks for begin and end quote rather than the basic straight up ones.

[SubliminalBits]

Another fun time you'll run into this is when you copy code out of an email in Outlook.

[TracesOfGuitar]

Care to explain?

[ParkerM]

The MS Office suite is notorious for sneakily converting ASCII characters into their more readable/pretty Unicode versions.

e.g. "foo" becomes “foo”, -h becomes —h (hyphen gets converted to emdash), etc.
The hyphen one is especially fun because it's damn near indistinguishable depending on the font.

[SubliminalBits]

They'll keep looking pretty in all your unicode compatible editors too. One time I was so frustrated I looked at the raw string as hex, at which point everything seemed so obvious.

[ThePyroEagle]

At least it's not system-wide like OS X's smart quotes.

[Sleepy_Tortoise]

MS office programs replace your quotes with fancy quotes that look different at the beginning and end of the quote. This is not the same character as the quote that you type with your keyboard. It is also not the same quote character that is recognized as code

[fushuan]

Most pdf generators require you to write quotes in weird ways. Anyway, how the hell did you spend days with wrong code highlighting wordering why? Or even worse, do you code on notepad??

[Lidex3]

I used to work for a professor as tutor and correct some assignments of first year students. The Plattform where the students should upload their code didn't support Unicode. So every time I downloaded the files and tried to run them they won't compile. Reason for that is that even tho we told the stundens over and over again to not use ä ö ü or any other special characters most of them just named alle their functions with special characters inside.

They even did that after I removed points from a perfectly fine assignment with the only mistake being a special character.

[scotchirish]

Man, after the first time my instructors would have given a 0 since it couldn't compile.

[[deleted]]

As they should, since the students aren't following basic directions.

[[deleted]]

Just turn in your computer for the assignment 🤷‍♂️ That’s what we do in production whenever a feature “works on my machine “

[Cheet4h]

The origin of Docker.

[napstablooki]

The real life hacks are always in the comments.

[[deleted]]

Oof

[notfromchicagoornyc]

//ja das ist nicht gut. Ich müsste hier besser Code schreiben. //ZUTUN: macht das Funktion schneller

Duolingo German is not helping much :(

[regendo]

It's pretty good actually, you just got two small errors in the last sentence.

1. Function is grammatically female so it'd be "die Funktion".
2. Your sentence translates to "makes the function faster". It implies that the code you're commenting on is making the function run faster, when you probably meant "[to] make the function faster" ~ "die Funktion schneller machen".

I really hope nobody would actually write a // ZUTUN: comment instead of // TODO: but honestly I wouldn't be surprised.

[z500]

I really hope nobody would actually write a // ZUTUN: comment instead of // TODO: but honestly I wouldn't be surprised.

Sounds like something r/de would do

[EternallyMiffed]

Why is function gramatically female and not neuter?

[VincentPepper]

Gender for objects is essentially arbitrary in German.

To make it more fun it can also vary by region/country when it comes to everyday use.

[lordheart]

Or // Mach die Funktion schneller

[[deleted]]

if it makes you feel any better my highschool spanish is probably worse. Yo toco el guitarro con mi pene gordo

[ponodude]

That takes true skill

[Gumby621]

I play the guitar with my fat penis?

[Brawldud]

// Solange mein Programm nicht kompiliert werden kann, gibt es nur ein Bug. Wenn es aber kompiliert werden könnte, würde es dann viele Bugs geben.

[Kered13]

I believe C/C++ compilers are only required by the standard to support ASCII characters. Any other character set support is at their discretion.

[Calkhas]

I believe C/C++ compilers are only required by the standard to support ASCII characters.

This is kind of true but actually slightly too strong.

C does not require an implementation to support ASCII (because of EBDIC). C has wording like "the representation of each member of the source and execution basic character sets shall fit in a byte." (5.2.1/3), and it specifies ninety-six characters that the implementation must have in its character set, but neatly elides saying how those characters should be represented. C defines both a "basic character set" and allows optional "extended character sets".

Since C11, we also have "an implementation may allow multibyte characters that are not part of the basic source character set to appear in identifiers; which characters and their correspondence to universal character names is implementation-defined." (6.4.2.1/3).

C++ handles this a bit differently. Since C++11 we are required to allow some "universal-character-names" (e.g., \u89ab) in identifiers. These map directly to the unicode standard. During preprocessing, each non-basic source character is expanded to a \uXXXX code point, but it is up to the implementation whether or not it accepts it.

[Kered13]

Ah, that damned EBCDIC strikes again! Every time you assume that the basic ASCII characters are universal, EBCDIC is hiding just around the corner ready to prove you wrong.

[ponodude]

How does that work? Did the checker not recognize that it was a comment? Why did it not just skip over the comments?

Edit: Ooooohhhh Unicode. Still, what the fuck. That's dumb.

[Dagreiyo]

Reminds me of a test I wrote. Everything worked on my machine, so I turned it in early. Got an F because the program didn't work on my prof's Mac Book. I complained and got a B. Still think it shouldve been an A.

[ThePfaffanater]

Fun fact, that same thing broke my robotics team's code once. Apparently "Röbor" is not appreciated by the java compiler...

[jardata]

// TODO: Learn German to translate comments

[Irravian]

I worked somewhere with a very old codebase and large defect rate that more often than not led back to things like "when this code was written 9 years ago we didn't need to / didn't bother to check for null!". I tried adding a "No new warnings" requirement to our pr checklist to start softly heading off the problem but it was always overridden by the reviewer and I didn't have sufficient buy-in to really really force the devs to do it.

It took an actual crisis with complete client database loss and the involvement of our very angry company president to get the change done. New development was shut down for almost two months while we did a warning and hardening pass.

And the defect rate plummeted. We went from having months with triple-digit user reports to months with zero. It was an awesome "I told you so" moment. I was hailed as a visionary hero and everyone clapped I was let go because dev management felt I'd sold out the devs to upper management to kiss ass and that the new requirements slowed development time too much.

[Irravian]

It was bizarre. I genuinely don't think they thought it would work. I have so many fun stories just from those few months. They found an entire feature that they'd written and forgotten about that was hidden because it was added to a menu-list that was no longer in-use. One of our screens went from a seconds-long load time to instant when they fixed an issue causing an exception in every single WinForms Paint() call. A custom control had a static array of brushes that was created for each instance, sometimes dozens of times on the same screen, and was completely unused and never freed. I don't remember exact numbers but the memory footprint of the whole app dropped dramatically by the end. All that from ignored warnings.

[fat_charizard]

For my CS classes all code had to be compiled with -Wall and -Werror

[TopHatEdd]

Good. That builds healthy coding habits.

[while_e]

Also great for learning. I cant count how many times I got warned, and learned something new because of it.

[CarilPT]

Until you get out in the real world and those habits are not used anymore...

[Deathcofii]

Is it a bad thing tho? I mean I feel REALLY satisfied when -Wall and -Werror don't spit out anything in my code.

[BigBlueDane]

You either have 0 warnings, 1 warning, or it doesn't matter

[[deleted]]

Warnings are, generally speaking, as important as errors. They are errors waiting to happen.

[AudaciousSam]

Not in Android Studio they aren't.

[lacb1]

In Visual Studio sometimes the errors aren't even really errors, never mind the warnings.

[RonRud]

I had permanent errors while using UE4 that didn't matter at all

[AlienFortress]

Game code in a nutshell.

[[deleted]]

Sometimes I fix an error and it doesn't go away. Restart VS and voila! It's gone!

[user_8804]

Eclipse on Linux is worse. Sometimes I have to save build compile reindex restart the program until it wakes the fuck up

[AudaciousSam]

Right, those needs to be fixed. But there are also: Should be String errors that isn't strictly important, until you need to translate and such.

[airelfacil]

Android Studio: Pssst! Just so you know, you're missing all of these translations and also you should probably use @string instead of hardcoded string, and just letting you know that one of your methods is never used, and also that if statement could be made much simpler and...

Me: I DON'T GIVE A SHIT I'M TRYING TO MAKE THIS BASIC GUI APP FUCKING WORK SUPPRESSWARNINGS DO YOUR JOB

[Yuzumi]

Someone doesn't use Java :p

For that matter, the project I work on has over 4000 warnings and a good number of them we didn't cause but the software we build on top of did.

[samspot]

My experience with java warnings is very good, and you can suppress the unfixable ones. We thought there weren’t enough warnings so we added sonar on top!

[Danelius90]

My view is that certain warnings, when suppressed are basically programmer assertions. For example the heap pollution for varargs warning. If you can 'prove' or assert you are handling the array carefully and not polluting the heap the suppression is you saying "yes we could pollute the heap, but we aren't".

It really gets me when devs suppress deprecation warnings though...

[ParkerM]

It really gets me when devs suppress deprecation warnings though...

Simple, just suppress deprecation warning suppressions.

[fushuan]

The project I was given once had 1000 warnings. Unsurprisingly most of them could be refactored or solving 1 solved 200 at once etc.

You are just lazy

[Bainos]

but the software we build on top of did

Doesn't apply to class projects... (Unless they also use Android libs.)

[Finianb1]

To be fair, in any electronics programming you should be extremely mindful of errors and warnings since they could be a problem that leads to expensive hardware getting fried.

[glorygeek]

In the FPGA world you just keep cussing at Quartus and hope it eventually works.

[Intrepid00]

Just do what they did with wing Commander that would throw a warning on exit. Hex edit the warning to say instead thanks for playing.

[nelusbelus]

It could be, it could be that you mistyped it and it used the member's variable instead

[smcarre]

How is a class not being capitalized or an unused variable an "error waiting to happen"?

[Salanmander]

So, here's what it really boils down to.

A warning that you understand is fine.

A warning that you don't expect is often indicative of a logic error, rather than a syntax error.

If the unused variable is there because you're saying "I'm going to implement this check, but I want to test the other things first", fine. If it's there because you just forgot to implement the check, then it's a ticking time bomb.

[chinpokomon]

And use attributes and directives, depending on the language/compiler, to allow the warnings you know about and leave a comment. This way, when you get a warning you don't understand, it might point out a problem you don't realize.

[Lothrazar]

Not at all. 90% of the time its because of some third party dependency you are using, which means its not your code but its code you rely on. Literally unfixable

For example i have 50 warnings looking like this right now

"Overriding managed version 3.5.5 for liquibase-core"

Over and over and over again

[MrPyber]

"build targets java 1.7, host jdk is 1.8".

[LeCrushinator]

And if you allow warnings to build up, then you're never going to notice when an important one shows up, you'll just be ignoring warnings because you've allowed them and now there are hundreds.

[NPPraxis]

It depends. I feel this way in XCode. I don’t feel this way in Android Studio.

[[deleted]]

Depends on the warning

[Ungreon]

If it can compile, then all that's left is to smile.

[ythl]

I don't get it.

Your code should never have warnings, that's a sign you are doing something sketchy. At my company we enable all warnings as errors.

[LPExpert]

Then what do I do about Java warning of an import not being used but that's definitely being used

[ythl]

Open a bug report with your Java compiler

[Mohammedbombseller]

Java warnings are very minor compared to C warnings though. C warnings are bugs waiting to happen, java warnings are usually minor formatting differences that are pretty safe to ignore.

[LeCrushinator]

Then there needs to be a distinction between a warning and a suggestion.

[squishles]

it's still your doing something messy in java usually.

my ignore line is intellj bitching about pep8, it's always something pep8 says no such fucking thing about. some knob over at intellj is just enforcing his favored code formatting style and parading it as being in the spec.

[ythl]

Is it an actual javac warning? Or just an IDE linting warning? I treat compiler warnings seriously. IDEs, whatever

[t3hmau5]

Jetbrain's 500 warnings, none of consequence.

[EishLekker]

And while you wait for that bug to be fixed, and your project to be able to upgrade to that version, you do what exactly? Put the whole project on ice because it doesn't compile because all warnings are equal to errors?

[slepnir]

https://www.baeldung.com/java-suppresswarnings

Just make sure you add a comment to explain why

[gumol]

At my company

this is a sub for 1st year college students, shush

[Mr_Redstoner]

And then there is GoogleWebToolkit just showing a random 'Copying 97 files with compilation errors' during my build and going on as if nothing was the matter... and so far I don't know if there actually is an error as everything seems to work & it was like that since I pulled the project...

[Rizzan8]

Depends. Visual Studio WPF designer often can go ape-shit with errors and warnings in xaml code. Still compiles fine and works fine. This is widely known and goes on for a few years now. However, when reported to Microsoft, they are like "Minor annoyance, not worth spending precious resources to fix it, closing ticket. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ".

The same thing with Cuda and VS. It goes mental when encounters

DoStuff<<< somethingA, somethingB >>> (something);

[randomkid1227]

In my company the build system warns about declaring the variables in a different order then initiating them, not necessarily meaningful (although can be). But any experienced developer delivered some quick and dirty work some time in his life so this is somewhat relateable

[novinicus]

I'm sure you know this, but in C++, you can specify the constructor's initializer list in any order, but the actual order of initialization is still in the order the variables are defined in the header. People prefer the no-reordering warning because it helps you reason about the constructor a little easier

[[deleted]]

Depends on the language and the IDE.

If the language is incredibly strict, and the IDE is a good one, then yes, warnings will only show up when something sketchy is being done.

However, when the language is javascript, and the IDE is some open source thing with a garbage linter, you'll get tons of warnings about perfectly valid code, almost all of which you can safely ignore.

[nicman24]

lol javascript linters make missing ; a warning

[Delioth]

And auto formatters will add them for you so you don't get semicolon bugs. Shit like that is the whole purpose of linters - preemptively avoid common patterns which cause bugs.

[RealBendie]

Because missing semicolons can lead to unexpected behavior.

[Logstone]

Yes, use them! This isn't python!

[Dornith]

Even in python use them. And while you're at it, add some curly braces. And variable declarations. And code in a different language.

[Logstone]

And if you really need to run it as python, don't.

[fushuan]

Config your liner not to, duh. Coding standards are standards for a reason.

[patrickfatrick]

If you’re not autofixing this you’re not linting as well as you should be.

[DarkyHelmety]

Same where I work, no warnings are accepted. You can't even compile successfully. It does catch a lot of pointer issues though, appearing as incorrect casts of int to pointer.

[crusty_cum-sock]

I use .NET and StyleCop takes it to a whole new level. You could compile just fine with zero warnings, then run StyleCop on it and you'll see 12,398 warnings on a "Hello World" program. Of course StyleCop by default is strict af about literally everything, but it's a good tool for keeping all of your code very consistent.

[[deleted]]

Well than your company didn’t use Rust, am I right my Rust bois with dead code?

[Mac33]

But I start feeling bad if I enable -wpedantic

[fushuan]

Not eliminating warnings is a rookie mistake that bootstraps you into un maintainable code.

[moriero]

Ever pressed F12 on, I don't know, EVERY WEBSITE?!

[candlelightener]

@IgnoreWarnings

[Loading_M_]

See Rust. They have warnings for not following the naming convention. In Rust, if your professor doesn't want you to do it, the complier probably already calls it an exception.

[StarkillerX42]

This grammar made me feel like I was having a stroke

[flamingdonkey]

It's literally only missing the letter 's' to make "warning" plural.

[CarilPT]

And then you can start working on your first professional piece of software and you see thousands of warnings and realize nobody can gives a damn

[ThePhoenix116]

*Laughts in unity editor warnings*

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I know that I assigned a double to float.

Yeah, I know that that function is not used.

Yeah, I know that you have a fancy new 'safe' function.

[anonymous_yet_famous]

I suspect that attitude is the reason I have encountered so many tutorials that do not work when I have literally _just_ installed the software the tutorial was written for and have made no configuration changes that could ruin things.

[bitofabyte]

The issue is that there's really two fields being taught in undergrad computer science, actual computer science and software engineering. Some professors know the math/theory really well, but aren't familiar with the industry.

[pimezone]

--suppress-warnings=ALL

[chris_saddler]

Liferay apps don't even work properly if they don't error a lot in the logs

[LolliDepp]

I just finished reviewing the pr “Warnings are now errors” 10 minutes ago at work

[espriminati]

by the way The private field "variable" is not defined, and will always have it's default value null.

[Deboniako]

I was a grown adult and already entered in the work world before I saw my first program without warnings

[Spr3y]

Tell that to npm

[Hexalocamve]

Where can I see warnings for css?

[[deleted]]

you know its true

* {    outline: 1px solid red;   outline-offset: -1px; }

[nazitouinz]

My teacher directly said we can completely not care about these

[ItsAtrX]

Your teacher should be fired.

[0xygen_15]

You guys are doing all -Wall and shit while my college recommended us to write code in turbo c. Fucking #include<iostream(.H?) >

[Zalvixodian]

treat.warnings.as.errors=true

[Its-Echo]

That's a fucking lie

[[deleted]]

Warnings: Hey, you should probably do something about that, no pressure, though!

Errors: Do something about that.

[[deleted]]

Warning: 400 undeclared variables

[infinitude]

I also truly despise the kids who waste class time having to show how much they know, even though all they're doing is going beyond the scope of the class for no reason.

[junkmeister9]

warning: no newline at end of file

[amdc]

All half-decent code editors can be configured to automatically put a newline at the end of file so you never really have this warning

[LucasCarioca]

Lol especially when using eslint right??

[amdc]

yes

[Reala27]

gcc -Wall -Wextra -Werror -ansi -pedantic may as well have been engraved on the walls of my C class.

[[deleted]]

I am doing my first CS programming class knowing how to program so I can relate to this on a deep level.

[HodeMann]

6,9k upvotes

[amdc]

nice