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!

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.

Read your errors fully, kids

That's nerve wracking. But you know what's worse? Finding code that shouldn't work, not being able to figure out why it works, and having to leave it in production because of you "fix" it, the whole damned thing will come fluttering down like a house of cards in a slight breeze.

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. :/

As someone with 20+ years coding experience, this only gets worse as you get more experienced.

You should switch to Rust. Through massively impressive feats of compiler engineering and a phenomenal amount of novel syntax constructs that make Rust the hardest language for existing programmers to learn, the rustc team has successfully managed to move this agony from after the program compiles to before.

This is clearly an improvement.

There are way too many Notepad enthusiasts out there.

I have gained nothing from this experience and will do it again.

Whichever vendor or framework puts that on a shirt will get free advertising from me.

This is why linting and static typing are mandatory

I spent 4 hours today trying to figure out why a calculation to get a percentage (in decimal) was always returning exactly 1 no matter what parameters I tried passing to it. Turns out I'd forgotten to cast the ints being provided to decimal, even though I've had to do that so many times before. I'm not a sharp man

Then when it's a job, you can replace that with weeks. But instead of a silly syntax error, it's a slow memory leak that nobody seems to have noticed for years, but that now forces you to restart your service every day at the very least. And we just spent an afternoon, six people, looking at it and only making it worse.

Don't you love programming? I sure do!

Write smaller units. Test those units. Save time.

Image Transcription:

number-1-haxorus-fan

[In large text]
The coding experience:

"Okay, everything looks good, time to run it"
Code fails
"What? Let me try again…"
Code fails
"What the fuck, where's the issue???"
Checks syntax error
"GOD DAMN IT TELL ME WHERE THE FUCKING ISSUE IS YOU PIECE OF SHIT"
Hopelessly tries to fuck around with the code and find the error
"PLEASE PLEASE JUST WORK WHY WON'T YOU WORK-"
Notices obvious error that I should have noticed like 15 minutes ago
"Oh. I'm a fucking idiot."
Code works now
"I have gained nothing from this experience and I will do it again"

#coding #coding pain #python #coding hell
#this is from painfully personal experience
#but replace 15 minutes with a fucking hour

57 notes

15 minutes.. rookie numbers

The thing is, you don't make syntax mistakes on purpose. Especially if you know a language extremely well, a syntax error will happen at random, you won't notice it (if you did, you would have fixed it), and it therefore becomes invisible to you.

Part of your brain "knows" there's no error, because you know the language extremely well, and because if you had made an error, you would have fixed it.

This leads to acute, irrational frustration. It's very human.

There's not really a solution, just smoke more weed and take your eyes off the screen occasionally.

Me and my cs prof i'm TA'ing for trying to debug two swapped lines for an hour yesterday be like

Hey at least they didn't have to trace a bug in their core framework. Only to find it is both in the issue tracker and 10 years old, and there is no offical fix. So you have to make a hacky patch yourself

I've learned that in these scenarios, show it to somebody else. They'll see the stupid mistake you made within seconds.