Reminds me when I was working with a guy and he named a database table
recieved
. I had adapted my code to that, and then one day without warning he renamed it toreceived
- and it took us an hour to figure out why everything broke.Our Python virtual environments at work on all Linux-servers are in the directory /opt/vens instead of /opt/venvs so when some intern corrects that, we will be screwed!
had a co-worker once who called the variable holding the first record in a complicated workflow “rec1st” and the last record “reclst”, unaware that in every font used by every code editor except his, a lowercase l and number 1 look identical.
i spent a day debugging that after he quit.
No good code font would make
1
andl
look identical. Character differentiability is like the most important thing.Look, JetBrains did it right.
Excel wrongly assuming the year 1900 was a leap year for their timestamps is my favorite bug that will never be fixed because everyone has built workarounds for this already
The fact that they mention using EMACS makes it even funnier
I wrote code for industrial automation years ago (think assembly line machines). I was reviewing production code and found a stupid bug and fixed it, then reinstalled. The motors moved incorrectly - I don’t recall if that was the time it smashed glass everywhere, but “fixing” the code definitely broke the program. I could not figure out why…but due to time constraints I sadly had reinsert the bug to put the machine back in production.
Some nights that still bothers me.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Donald Knuth’s webpage states the line was used to end a memo entitled Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion (1977)