• xmunk
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    89
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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!

      • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • MajorHavoc@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      This meme was written by a novice that does not yet know true pain.

      Hey now, lots of us still…

      An error that takes fifteen minutes to find!

      I see what you did there.

      DLL hell

      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.

    • mindbleach
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      See also: James Mickens, The Night Watch.

      The systems programmer has read the kernel source, to better understand the deep ways of the universe, and the systems programmer has seen the comment in the scheduler that says “DOES THIS WORK LOL,” and the systems programmer has wept instead of LOLed, and the systems programmer has submitted a kernel patch to restore balance to The Force and fix the priority inversion that was causing MySQL to hang. A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law.

      • xmunk
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Thank you for introducing me to my new second favorite piece of literature titled “Night Watch”!

        • mindbleach
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Sam Vimes would be a conflicted member for a post-end-times forecast-says-blood kind of gang.

    • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Can’t you just grep (or something) for ?> followed by a whitespace? Though yeah, both are fun problems. Luckily I had to deal with DLL hell only once in my lifetime and presumably, if I stay on the same career path, will never have to again.