723

The biggest mystery known to mankind (programming.dev)

submitted 1 month ago by CodiUnicorn@programming.dev to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[-] AceOnTrack 90 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

"I can't select the proper option in the dropbox, it doesn't exist anymore" -> sends me a screenshot of the missing item

get on website, the item is right there for me to select

log into database, there's nothing wrong, everything is as should be

recieve new message: "I can select it now, thanks for your prompt fix!"

thanks man, I did nothing

[-] olenkoVD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 month ago

[-] nous@programming.dev 72 points 1 month ago

My favourite: The code does not work. You make a change, it breaks more. You undo that mistake: it now works.

[-] Dremor@lemmy.world 32 points 1 month ago

Good ol' cache.

[-] mogranja@lemmy.eco.br 4 points 1 month ago

It's either cache, DNS or DNS cache.

[-] hakunawazo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Or in the silliest circumstances wrong development environment.

[-] ouRKaoS@lemmy.today 24 points 1 month ago

I've had:

Code is broken. Make change

Code broken worse. Undo change

Code still broken. Revert to previous version

Code works. Check code- it has the change you just made that didn't work

[-] CodiUnicorn@programming.dev 8 points 1 month ago

Yeah, that's classic

[-] BehindTheBarrier@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

My worst one, have working code, make a change, it broke. Revert it, still broken...

The issue was that all icons and stuff randomly got a wrong size in the GUI. Just had to restart the machine to fix it, but I was really pulling my hair out when I somehow broke things backwards in time.

[-] teslekova@sh.itjust.works 34 points 1 month ago

It's fun when I just try to compile it again and it works fine. I'm sure that's a good sign.

[-] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 16 points 1 month ago

Nondeterministic compile. LLM compiler?

[-] Thorry@feddit.org 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Often this is because some part of either the IDE or the build chain failed to clear some part that needed to be cleared. Especially for large projects and on older machines, compiling takes a while. Usually only small changes are made during programming, so to optimize the work flow it tries to only re-compile what absolutely needs to be recompiled. This speeds up the process, allowing for iterative development without waiting a long time.

I remember working with Java on my old Pentium 1 system and it taking easily 45 mins to compile something. That's where the xkcd 303 got its origins. https://xkcd.com/303/

But sometimes this fails in some way, which can lead to very bizarre results. Often causing headscratches figuring out what went wrong, assuming the fault to be in what the developer did. A quick way to check is to simply delete the intermediate compiler result (often the obj or bin dir, or both) and do a whole fresh compile. Sometimes it's enough to simply compile again, often when the error was caused by some race condition in the build process. For example something being flagged as needing cleanup, but the build being done before the cleanup was done. A recompile at that point will probably work as the cleanup has most likely happened.

Sometimes shit's just cursed and there is no explanation, probably angered some coding god somewhere. Perform the proper ritual and you're good to go.

[-] naeap@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yep, a clean build often got rid of the weirdest bugs I had, because some shared memory was misaligned, because, as you said, because of compile optimization, some parts didn't know about the changes

[-] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Ive had some build bugs where a clean build didnt fix it, restarting the IDE didn't fix it, but rebooting the computer did.

I imagine some long running process even after the IDE is closed had been corrupted or something.

[-] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 month ago

Oh yeah, I was mostly just kidding with the LLM compiler bit. I've run into issues with incremental compiles working on the JVM ecosystem myself (mainly Kotlin though, as my work in the ecosystem took place early this decade). Still didn't want to clean build every time though, because on an M1 Pro it was about 5 minutes to build some of our backend services from scratch and I tend to like a really rapid feedback loop for testing, changing code, recompiling, re-testing.

These days my docker container reloads the entire project when I edit any file, but it takes 10 seconds since there's no need to compile anything since it's Python. Pure bliss in comparison (the development pace that is; I actually liked Kotlin more as a language even though Python is fine)

[-] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Android had a quick deploy feature where you could push minor changes like text or layout updates to the phone while testing without having to actually rebuild it. Like press button and a couple seconds later it updates.

It without fail over years and years of trying to use it, always failed frequently, and you'd end up with unexpected behavior or crashes. For a time anyway, they tried to default it to on.

Im not sure what the current state of it is today, I just stopped bothering to test it out.

[-] IzzyScissor@lemmy.world 22 points 1 month ago

Why was this made with AI instead of a meme generator? Poor Tom got the Uncanny Valley filter.

[-] dabster291@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

Could be upscaled.

[-] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 16 points 1 month ago

a while ago, during a game jam, while i was making some of the worst gdscript i have ever seen, i have encountered a bug

after adding a print to see the value of a variable, the bug disappeared. Confused, i commented out the line i just added. The bug was still fixed

i removed the comment. The bug reappeared

[-] Willem@kutsuya.dev 3 points 1 month ago

printing to a console could enforce a flush, sync thread or other shenanigans.

usually setting a breakpoint would have the same effect and gives me the suggestion of a threading issue.

[-] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 month ago

the problem wasnt that the print statement fixed the bug

the problem was that even if i removed the print statement and added a comment on that line, the bug would also be fixed

[-] haroldfinch@feddit.nl 12 points 1 month ago

I have never met an expert programmer with this particular issue.

Git gud.

[-] notabot@piefed.social 27 points 1 month ago

Git gud

Git, indeed, good.

[-] kehet@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Nowadays the answer is probably a 5,000-word essay that no one has (or will) read

[-] OpenStars@piefed.social 10 points 1 month ago

Written by AI. Also read by AI. Humans need not apply.

[-] Viceversa@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Humans are for the bills to pay.

[-] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago

Remember the ~~human~~ bills.

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 month ago

Changed a comment.

[-] jimmy90@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

with a language like rust this actually hardly ever happens

[-] zaubentrucker@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 month ago

You don't know how fucked up my build.rs can get

[-] kamen@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

On a serious note, if you can't look at the diff and make sense of it, you're doing something wrong.

[-] iocase@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago

I've literally experienced the "I changed/edited/deleted this comment and now my code works" before and it floored me. I can't for the life of me remember what happened specifically I just remember being scared. It shouldn't do that, and since it did something I deeply don't understand happened behind the scenes.

[-] Traister101@lemmy.today 7 points 1 month ago

That's usually (in toolchians that aren't broken) a caching issue. IE what you see in your editor isn't what actually got ran, even if you told it to recompile.