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The Six Stages of Debugging (2012)
- ufmace 13y ago1. This doesn't work, and I don't know why 2. I have no idea how this is supposed to work 3. Let's change some random thing that shouldn't be related at all 4. This works now, and I have no idea why 5. Pray to the gods of code that whatever it was that broke doesn't happen again
- Theriac25 13y agoThis seems more accurate to me than the OP.
- vajrabum 13y agoFrom a recent meme: 99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs. Take one down, patch it in Prod, 117 little bugs in the code. -Attributed to Kurt Cobain
- AlexanderDhoore 13y agoI just sang this to my sister. She laughed, but doesn't understand. God, we're nerdy.
- sateesh 13y agoAnd then there is Joe's (Joe Armstrong) Law of Debugging :) "All errors will be plus/minus three statements of the place you last changed the program".
- mwcremer 13y agoSomebody taped this on their door at work: The door to which they were taped was in IL2 and belonged to Mike Engber. He says, "The version on my door now is nicely laminated." The list itself was created be me some years prior when we worked on Newton, after a particularly frustrating DMA debug session.
- apag 13y agoHey, cool! Nice to get an attribution – is it OK if I add the citation to the post? Anything else you remember about it?
- nutmeg 13y agoThe Margaritaville stages of debugging: 1. It's nobody's fault 2. It could be my fault 3. It's my own damn fault
- k3n 13y agoI was merely going to append to OP's list: 7. Who wrote this crap? 8. Oh, I wrote this crap...
- mattdeboard 13y agoI call this the "Kaiser Soze" bug. You spend hours trying to figure out what's causing a bug, only to realize you're the one who caused it.
- mattsouth 13y agoI had forgotten about this site and am pleased to get a reminder. Its the place I first saw the immortal quote: A friend of mine in a compiler writing class produced a compiler with one error message “you lied to me when you told me this was a program”. —Pete Fenelon http://plasmasturm.org/code/ http://plasmasturm.org/code/
- badman_ting 13y agoDo yourself a huge favor and skip steps 1-3. Have a deep, abiding, instinctual faith in your own incompetence.
- timthorn 13y agoUntil you hit a compiler bug. I'll never forget a certain PIC C compiler that would only ever take the first case in a switch statement, and how long it took me to believe that my code was actually fine but that the compiler wasn't.
- badman_ting 13y agoYeah, or VM/runtime bugs. I bet I go bald from that time I had to use Mono.
- army 13y agoI've had many times where I swore that something was a compiler bug. I did hit one once with Haskell/ghc, but I think that is the only instance.
- bazzargh 13y agoThis one made me swear a lot: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842136 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842136 ... remote login to a windows 2003 server changes the default locale, breaking servers that depend on the default locale (which of course they shouldn't!). When this bit us, we were working on the server in a different room from a guy who was very occasionally logging in remotely, as I recall we only realised when he left his door open and we saw the two things happen at once.
- jfb 13y agoI used to work with a guy who would blame every bug that cursory inspection couldn't uncover on the compiler. This is of course laughable, but he'd once, ages before, actually found a compiler bug. I wonder if having this amazing get-out-of-debugging card made him a jobsworth, or was simply a magical proof of "God takes care of fools and drunks."
- jordigh 13y agoThe first time I saw this was on bash.org: http://bash.org/?950581 http://bash.org/?950581
- lelandbatey 13y agoThe "one day we will write tests" hits more than a little close to home.