Silly?!!
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Hello A silly question.. Just for the sake of sharing funny memories. What is the most funny, silly, ridiculous programming mistake you ever made??:-D Also if anybody has nice memories from the old times -when the OS was loaded each time from a 5.25" disk-, please post it. I can't seem to remember any of mine at the moment;P, but I'll sure post anything I remember. Regards:rose:
Nader Elshehabi wrote:
Also if anybody has nice memories from the old times
Well, it was better than the paper tape option. I did not like the 75 minute compile times (with me swapping the floppies in the 4 drives used for scratch space.
Nader Elshehabi wrote:
ridiculous programming mistake
Well, maybe not my mistake but impacted by it. This was on an IBM 360 mainframe. Some one set a global function and called it "X". So every program that used X (and yes my error to let type just default - it was fortran) suddenly just was not behaving right. That debug map just did not make sense :)
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Hello A silly question.. Just for the sake of sharing funny memories. What is the most funny, silly, ridiculous programming mistake you ever made??:-D Also if anybody has nice memories from the old times -when the OS was loaded each time from a 5.25" disk-, please post it. I can't seem to remember any of mine at the moment;P, but I'll sure post anything I remember. Regards:rose:
I dropped my stack of un-numbered FORTRAN punch cards...took me half a day to put them back in order.
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
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I don't know how silly it is, but several years ago I was reviewing my "bag o' tricks", a C++ class library I'd built up over the years to cover all sorts of things. I kept coming back to a piece of code in one class that really bugged me. It seemed so badly done. There was a cryptic comment about it working, but it still bugged me. Finally, I had enough and spent a day rewriting code until I hit some stumbling blocks and simultaneously started having deja vu about what I was doing. I pressed on until it hit me; I'd tried this before and ended up in the same dead end; I'm not talking a similar dead end, but the exact same intractable problem. This time, after I rolled the code back, I put a comment block that warned me about ever trying to rewrite the code again. * * * The next one wasn't my doing, but too funny to leave out. I was running BoundsChecker on some code and getting horrible resource and memory leaks. I was stunned. Further examination found dozens of "new"s without any "delete"s all done by the same guy, who was otherwise a good developer. Then it hit me: for the previous two years he'd been doing C# programming and when he switched back to C++ he forgot there was no garbage collector. He later confirmed the same thing.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
Joe Woodbury wrote:
I put a comment block that warned me about ever trying to rewrite the code again
yeah, i have a couple of those. "DONT TOUCH THIS! it might look like you can do XYZ but you've already tried that. just leave it alone!"
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Hello A silly question.. Just for the sake of sharing funny memories. What is the most funny, silly, ridiculous programming mistake you ever made??:-D Also if anybody has nice memories from the old times -when the OS was loaded each time from a 5.25" disk-, please post it. I can't seem to remember any of mine at the moment;P, but I'll sure post anything I remember. Regards:rose:
not too long ago i was writing some SQL to do an Update. i got the fields and values part of the query finished, then decided to try it out. yay! :cool: i hadn't put on the "Where" part yet, of course. :omg: it wrecked every row in the table (all 13,000 of them). :((
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I dropped my stack of un-numbered FORTRAN punch cards...took me half a day to put them back in order.
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
Gary Kirkham wrote:
I dropped my stack of un-numbered FORTRAN punch cards
At which time you either remembered to draw a diagonal with a felt marker. Or did number them. :) We had fun one day. Took some random cards and substituded a guys box when he was not looking (with an appolgy note for knocking them off the table. :rolleyes: )
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I dropped my stack of un-numbered FORTRAN punch cards...took me half a day to put them back in order.
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
That's an uuh.. unconventional programming error. (At least in my mindset :-D)
-- Bender's humor by Microsoft Joke
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I asked a programming question in the Lounge once
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I'm debating if that's a good thing or a bad thing. :->
Jeremy Falcon
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Gary Kirkham wrote:
I dropped my stack of un-numbered FORTRAN punch cards
At which time you either remembered to draw a diagonal with a felt marker. Or did number them. :) We had fun one day. Took some random cards and substituded a guys box when he was not looking (with an appolgy note for knocking them off the table. :rolleyes: )
I think all the ones after that were numbered. ;)
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
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That's an uuh.. unconventional programming error. (At least in my mindset :-D)
-- Bender's humor by Microsoft Joke
Listen Sonny, back in my day programmers were real men, able to lug around 50 pound boxes of punch cards under each arm and not break a sweat. Not like you sissy latte drinking "software developers" today. ;P
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
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Hello A silly question.. Just for the sake of sharing funny memories. What is the most funny, silly, ridiculous programming mistake you ever made??:-D Also if anybody has nice memories from the old times -when the OS was loaded each time from a 5.25" disk-, please post it. I can't seem to remember any of mine at the moment;P, but I'll sure post anything I remember. Regards:rose:
Nader Elshehabi wrote:
Also if anybody has nice memories from the old times -when the OS was loaded each time from a 5.25" disk
OK, if these are old times, what about when you loaded the OS from paper tape (actually using the keys on the front of the computer to load a paper tape containing the loader program, which was then used to load the OS). The times when patching a program meant covering up holes in the paper tape by little bits of paper (come on, fess up - how many people have done this?). The times when you could tell what program the computer was running by the noises they made. The times when a programming competition meant writing a program that did something as well as playing a recognisable tune on the computer After that came 8" floppy disks: 5.25" disks - luxury
Graham My signature is not black, just a very, very dark blue
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Listen Sonny, back in my day programmers were real men, able to lug around 50 pound boxes of punch cards under each arm and not break a sweat. Not like you sissy latte drinking "software developers" today. ;P
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
Gary Kirkham wrote:
not break a sweat.
You could not afford to. Ever try to feed a sweaty punch card in the reader. X|
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Nader Elshehabi wrote:
Also if anybody has nice memories from the old times -when the OS was loaded each time from a 5.25" disk
OK, if these are old times, what about when you loaded the OS from paper tape (actually using the keys on the front of the computer to load a paper tape containing the loader program, which was then used to load the OS). The times when patching a program meant covering up holes in the paper tape by little bits of paper (come on, fess up - how many people have done this?). The times when you could tell what program the computer was running by the noises they made. The times when a programming competition meant writing a program that did something as well as playing a recognisable tune on the computer After that came 8" floppy disks: 5.25" disks - luxury
Graham My signature is not black, just a very, very dark blue
Graham Shanks wrote:
After that
You skipped a few machines that used compact cassettes (and no I am not talking about the Vic-20's!) such as the Wang 700 series.
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I installed a floppy drive cable upside down and spent 10 minutes figuring out why it kept corrupting the disk. As for programming I tend to not make silly mistakes. Sure I have my share of simple WTF's but those I usually fix without much fanfare. I suppose my biggest and silliest mistake was my first VB6 app that I was contracted to work. It was so bad that I rewrote most of it for free even though the original satisfied the wording on the contract.
A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the Universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation." -- Stephen Crane
I still remember my first VB application. After spending two monthes programming it, it crashed on the first demo. Lucky for me it was for my brother.;P
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Gary Kirkham wrote:
not break a sweat.
You could not afford to. Ever try to feed a sweaty punch card in the reader. X|
Michael A. Barnhart wrote:
Ever try to feed a sweaty punch card in the reader.
Nope, they had operators for that. Wouldn't even let us in the room...had to pass the card decks through a window.
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
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Listen Sonny, back in my day programmers were real men, able to lug around 50 pound boxes of punch cards under each arm and not break a sweat. Not like you sissy latte drinking "software developers" today. ;P
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
I guess you didn't have to go to the gym at that time.;P
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Hello A silly question.. Just for the sake of sharing funny memories. What is the most funny, silly, ridiculous programming mistake you ever made??:-D Also if anybody has nice memories from the old times -when the OS was loaded each time from a 5.25" disk-, please post it. I can't seem to remember any of mine at the moment;P, but I'll sure post anything I remember. Regards:rose:
A variable named
bthat should have been anh. I spent somewhere over 20 hours debugging time on that one :doh:. And before any of you people jump my case about naming conventions: this was back during college when men were men, women were women, and self-respecting source code was stored on punched cards like God intended.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Gary Kirkham wrote:
not break a sweat.
You could not afford to. Ever try to feed a sweaty punch card in the reader. X|
Just checked your bio... I worked on an IBM 360 as well. I remember when I got my 3270 terminal. :jig:
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
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I asked a programming question in the Lounge once
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I dropped my stack of un-numbered FORTRAN punch cards...took me half a day to put them back in order.
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
Ah yes, a 'floor sort' :-D. When I took Data Structures in college, it was in FORTRAN on the university IBM mainframe, using punched cards. We had a guy in the class who was blind. I helped him with a floor sort one time. The funny thing was, he'd originally punched his deck on a punch where the ribbon was dry, so you couldn't read the text. Fortunately, he'd run the deck through a verifier that punched line numbers in columns 73-80 for you, and those were readable. The guy himself had learned to read Hollerith directly off the card. He said it was like Braille, just a heck of a lot slower since each character was spread out over so much space.
Software Zen:
delete this;