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!
I spent 7 hours to debug why doubles in Java classes brick my class file parser only to discover the following small print in the specification after I read the corresponding OpenJDK source code: In retrospect, making 8-byte constants take two constant pool entries was a poor choice. Yeah no shit. I chose to write a custom user stylesheet for Oracle specifications to enlarge notes since they’re obviously critical to the implementation of JVMs. I guess the technical writers at Oracle didn’t want to offend the developers who wrote the JVM originally at the expense of developers who write JVMs today.
I once spent 6 months debugging an issue in a legacy component of our system that ultimately boiled down to “The team this component talks with forgot to revert changes they made for testing and obstinantely refused to admit any changes were made at all for 6 months until I could figure out this deprecated technology enough to prove it enough that the product owners forced them to look”
Not really programming but I once had an issue that lasted for months like that:
I’m working with a software specific to our industry that generate quotes, sales order and production orders.
For quotes and sales order a PDF can be created and archived in the right folder automatically, or you can use the windows “Print to pdf” printer to do that manually which take closes to a minute for the sales person to create the right folder, with the right name and put the PDF in there with the order number.
The automatic PDF creation fail to include our logo each time and I battled for months with the software company that was telling me that everything is working fine.
Until I looked in the metadata of the PDF the company was sending us, few of the PDFs they were sending is did not have any logo and were created by their software, some had their logo and were created with an external PDF printer.
After I realized they had the same problem internally but were lying about it I just took a day to create a python script running as a service on the server that automatically add the logo on the PDF created and that was it.
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!
I spent 7 hours to debug why doubles in Java classes brick my class file parser only to discover the following small print in the specification after I read the corresponding OpenJDK source code: In retrospect, making 8-byte constants take two constant pool entries was a poor choice. Yeah no shit. I chose to write a custom user stylesheet for Oracle specifications to enlarge notes since they’re obviously critical to the implementation of JVMs. I guess the technical writers at Oracle didn’t want to offend the developers who wrote the JVM originally at the expense of developers who write JVMs today.
I once spent 6 months debugging an issue in a legacy component of our system that ultimately boiled down to “The team this component talks with forgot to revert changes they made for testing and obstinantely refused to admit any changes were made at all for 6 months until I could figure out this deprecated technology enough to prove it enough that the product owners forced them to look”
Not really programming but I once had an issue that lasted for months like that: I’m working with a software specific to our industry that generate quotes, sales order and production orders.
For quotes and sales order a PDF can be created and archived in the right folder automatically, or you can use the windows “Print to pdf” printer to do that manually which take closes to a minute for the sales person to create the right folder, with the right name and put the PDF in there with the order number.
The automatic PDF creation fail to include our logo each time and I battled for months with the software company that was telling me that everything is working fine.
Until I looked in the metadata of the PDF the company was sending us, few of the PDFs they were sending is did not have any logo and were created by their software, some had their logo and were created with an external PDF printer.
After I realized they had the same problem internally but were lying about it I just took a day to create a python script running as a service on the server that automatically add the logo on the PDF created and that was it.
Hey now, lots of us still…
I see what you did there.
For anyone reading along who has not experienced DLL hell, don’t believe this account on face value.
xmunk is clearly understating the horrors, as a kindness, to protect you from what we went through.