Worst Exception!!

StatementTerminator

The offending value would be kinda nice to know as well! I once had to deal with this in a daily import file that we were processing from another company. The file had tens of thousands of records, and I wrote the code to import the data into our system. Someone at the company who gave us the import file liked to go in and make manual edits once in a while...yeah. The specs were not meant as suggestions. So I had one bad value in one field of one record in a large import file, causing the whole import to bomb, and no clue other than a guess at which columns were suspect. Thanks MS SQL. I had to implement a binary search to cast values in the file until I found the bad one. Good times.

Harley L Pebley

The one that should be raised but isn't, or caught and simply ignored, causing the application to not work correctly with no indication as to why.

Peter Webb

Up until yesterday "Out of Memory" was my worst exception. By coincidence, today I found out was not actually an exception, but an error condition in Java, which explains why I wasn't catching it. So now its been promoted to worst throwable. And I hate pretty much everything you can throw.

StatementTerminator

LOL, this kind of lazy exception "handling" is worse than none at all :) But why should a consultant care, they don't have to actually maintain the code.

Dark Pallys

"Catastrophic Failure", no more, no less. No error code, no reference to where the error came from or how it got there..... SIGH! There's nothing worse than getting an error like that after a 12 hour coding session...

StatementTerminator

PC LOAD LETTER This is what happens when full-blown engineers who write a little code try their hand at exception handling. Everyone knows that PC means paper cassette (what else could it possibly mean?), and that LETTER means the letter-size paper tray, right? Surely that's more informative than "ADD PAPER," I mean it tells you exactly what kind of paper to use and where to put it. My favorite, though, is the GPF error message from Windows 95/NT: "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Back in the NT/95 days I worked as the IT guy for a public library. People would get that message on the public terminals and freak out, expecting the police to show up. I thought about hacking the Windows API to add sirens and flashing lights to the dialog, but figured it might not look good on my next review. The conversations I had with patrons trying to explain the error were pretty funny though. Even funnier were the patrons who just got up and made a bee-line for the door, wonder what they were surfing?

Patrick Fox

That was my choice too, Out of Memory. GDI throws this a lot and it's misleading. People with 8 gigs of ram scratch their heads wondering where it went wrong. GDI uses limited pools of memory for its stuff, and when it runs out it doesn't tell you which of these pools was exhausted. Even worse it usually lacks GDI resources to throw up a message box telling you it ran into a problem. I've dealt with this a lot in the past week.

patbob

C#'s missing DLL exception is my absolute favorite worst. Not the exception itself, but because Microsoft put all these convenient fields in for identifying which DLL was missing, and then didn't bother to actually fill any of them in. [edit] Not worst, but rather my all time favorite, was the insufficient memory error message from the IBM (3090?) we had at school. It included the 800 phone number of the sales team so you could contact them to buy more memory. Of course, configuring the VM to have more RAM was the cheap answer :)

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.

waarnink

Who is General Failure? And why is he reading drive A?

patbob

YvesDaoust wrote:

This one gives me nightmares because so far I have been unable to troubleshoot it. The application refuses to start, that's it. No clue on what DLL was missing/of invalid type or whatsoever

Check into sxstrace. It generates a log of all side-by-side library loads, reporting what library versions were checked and which were loaded (or not found). Totally useless for C# though, but useful for native code.

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.

gggustafson

I would like to submit the following from [^]:

   Three things are certain:
   Death, taxes, and lost data.
   Guess which has occurred.

   Everything is gone;
   Your life's work has been destroyed.
   Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?

   I'm sorry, there's -- um --
   insufficient -- what's-it-called?
   The term eludes me ...

   Windows NT crashed.
   I am the Blue Screen of Death.
   No one hears your screams.

   Seeing my great fault
   Through darkening blue windows
   I begin again

   The code was willing,
   It considered your request,
   But the chips were weak.

   Printer not ready.
   Could be a fatal error.
   Have a pen handy?

   A file that big?
   It might be very useful.
   But now it is gone.

   Errors have occurred.
   We won't tell you where or why.
   Lazy programmers.

   Server's poor response
   Not quick enough for browser.
   Timed out, plum blossom.

   Chaos reigns within.
   Reflect, repent, and reboot.
   Order shall return.

   Login incorrect.
   Only perfect spellers may
   enter this system.

   This site has been moved.
   We'd tell you where, but then we'd
   have to delete you.

   wind catches lily
   scatt'ring petals to the wind:
   segmentation fault

   ABORTED effort:
   Close all that you have.
   You ask way too much.

   First snow, then silence.
   This thousand dollar screen dies
   so beautifully.

   With searching comes loss
   and the presence of absence:
   "My Novel" not found.

   The Tao that is seen
   Is not the true Tao, until
   You bring fresh toner.

   The Web site you seek
   cannot be located but
   endless others exist

   Stay the patient course
   Of little worth is your ire
   The network is down

And many others.

Gus Gustafson

Reelix

Uncaught Error - 'undefined' The error message that gets thrown when an HTML5 WebSocket crashes due to an unknown cause...

-= Reelix =-

Member 4608898

Something went wrong but I'm not telling you what 2) Illegal/invalid value but I'm not going to tell you what the illegal/invalid value is.

Eric_M

AppHangB...does anyone have any idea where that comes from or what causes it.

RafagaX

java.lang.ClassNotFoundException

In an applet, pure bliss to solve... :rolleyes:

CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...

Alan Balkany

You beat me to it!

KP Lee

Both of those exceptions explain what you did and that it is your (the developer's) fault that it happened. If both of them said "You are an effing idiot!", the statement would be true, but not at all helpful about what went wrong. I've worked in languages where you'd never get the first error because there is no such thing as an object and over-indexing an array isn't an error. I've had scheduled programs that blew up because it had an illegal divide by zero error or illegal instruction. Couldn't for the life of me find out what was wrong with my code. Turned out it was scheduled to run when another code was also running that overindexed its array and rewrote my code's machine language in memory and so my code went crazy. The operator happened to notice other people's code were blowing up whenever this same program ran.

Jacquers wrote:

index is outside the bounds of the array

Is a life-saver. Or at least a time-saver because my time isn't wasted when someone else is the idiot. As it is, too many times, that's my role. (IE Idiot programmer.)

KP Lee

English is my first language and I didn't get it. That or my memory had a stack-overflow problem so I forgot what you meant. I think my memory is on RAM that doesn't get refreshed too often, I forget what I'm

AlphaDeltaTheta

All C compilers are probably like that... even MINGW and MSVC does this till today... By far, only tcc gives good compile time errors!!

AlphaDeltaTheta

Hoa! :omg: Well I never programmed any of OS/* or COBOL... But this one looks insane