v/programming: I just spent 12h in Delphi trying to fix fatal bug. At the end I had to check almost line per line until I removed a '\' character from a string.

I just spent 12h in Delphi trying to fix fatal bug. At the end I had to check almost line per line until I removed a '\' character from a string.

3 20 Sep 2016 10:18 by u/Kimviki

AMA before I kill myself.

P.S. Fuck Delphi, fuck Windows and fuck all this propietary untraceable garbage.

30 comments

12 u/go1dfish 20 Sep 2016 10:29

Some languages are worse than others, but this sort of thing can happen with any of them I think.

I think it's stuff like this that causes me occasional existential crisis as a developer. It's really demoralizing when all you have to show for X hours of frustration is a single character change.

2 u/Codewow 20 Sep 2016 11:22

Yup.. Happened to me not too long ago with PHP... No line number to go by.

7 u/texan11moore 20 Sep 2016 13:12

I agree, I spent the whole day yesterday trying to figure out a performance issue that was caused by a missing '&' in c++.

5 u/manapot 20 Sep 2016 13:17

I once spent three hours trying to debug a javascript file before finding out I had forgotten to put a semi-colon at the end of a statement. I felt like I was going crazy.

4 u/theoldguy 20 Sep 2016 13:44

Yeah, every few months I can't figure out why

for(int i = 0; i < numrecords; i++);
do_stuff();

doesn't work like I expect. That little finger reaches out and sticks in that semicolon by iteself

0 u/Brian_BeMuch 20 Sep 2016 20:22

Then include the '{'s for you know they should never follow a semi-colon.

1 u/McPhatty 20 Sep 2016 18:10

That's a Perl of wisdom right there; /newline

0 u/BeniBela 26 Sep 2016 16:52

On the other hand I work on a project where eslint was set up, so that you have to remove all trailing semi-colons, or it complains

1 u/tribblepuncher 20 Sep 2016 20:59

Can confirm, when I was much less experienced I spent two weeks looking for a problem that ended up being an extremely tiny typo. I think this is a rite of passage for programmers.

One you keep repeating, no less.

4 u/MrPim 20 Sep 2016 12:50

Fuck WinBatch for just this reason. God I hate that POS

2 u/rieekan 20 Sep 2016 10:48

I haven't written Delphi since the 90's.

Legacy system?

2 u/Kimviki [OP] 20 Sep 2016 16:06

Yep, and very bad written on top of that. The client is now trying like crazy to find developers.

0 u/BeniBela 26 Sep 2016 17:00

You think he will still looking in one or two years? I might need to find a job then.

1 u/SegFault 20 Sep 2016 18:10

Damn, son. Did that fix the problem?

1 u/damnittohell 20 Sep 2016 21:44

Been there.

1 u/LoftyGoat 20 Sep 2016 22:40

My sympathy. Spent much of a day debugging a C program, had to go so far as looking at its assembler language intermediate output before I noticed something funny... which was the result of an extra semicolon I'd been staring at all day and not noticing.

The longer you're in the business, the less that sort of thing surprises you.

0 u/SaneGoatiSwear 20 Sep 2016 11:10

hi, before you kill yourself could you go and fix the markdowndeep on git? that shit needs a fix bad

https://voat.co/v/voatdev/comments/1288745/6335174/10#6335174

https://voat.co/v/voatdev/comments/1289979/6332030/10#6332030

https://voat.co/v/voatdev/comments/1288745/6332021/10#6332021

some context from atko himself.

all of voat would be in your debt (for being able to strike, sub, and sup again)

sorry to add to your insanity if you do this.

if you are capable of 12hours of looking for one fucking \, you are the goat for this job

4 u/TheCompanionCube 20 Sep 2016 13:31

I assume he made money over that 12 hours

3 u/SaneGoatiSwear 20 Sep 2016 13:39

and he's had 6 days of voat enjoyment! payment enough, la?

0 u/TheCompanionCube 21 Sep 2016 15:41

haha touche

0 u/Kimviki [OP] 20 Sep 2016 16:00

Not nearly enough for this bullshit...

0 u/GIF-lLL-S0NG 20 Sep 2016 19:48

garbage in; garbage out.

0 u/dchem 21 Sep 2016 02:30

BURN IT ALL DOWN

0 u/BeniBela 26 Sep 2016 16:58

Why would the string matter? Was there not some input validation?

I just spent days figuring out why my program did not start after updating to the newest freepascal 3.0 release.

Turns out it was a known bug in Android that has been fixed in freepascal trunk.

So they told me to update to 3.1.1, which I did. Afterwards freepascal crashed when compiling my program.