Most Unhelpful Message Ever

[Gary Wheeler]

vonb wrote:

Why can the HR department be empty when somebody new starts?

Simple: the home office downsizes your local HR presence to a single overworked and harassed individual. Despite her angelic personality and the patience of Buddha, sh!t still happens.

Software Zen: delete this;

[Langenbach]

I've done something like that too. (And I confess I never cared to take it out of production code. At least I put a bit of comment besides it. And I put in a bit of information where this strange condition occurred, of course.) Sometimes we get errors because the programming environment behaves differently from what the documentation says, and they are among the errors that are hardest to find. And iirc, it was one of these cases when I put in that code (among tons of similar code elsewhere of course). (We even had several times encountered an error that occurs only in production code, but never in debug.)

[vonb]

Gary Wheeler wrote:

home office downsizes your local HR presence

The problem is: it is already the home office where I work... And there is a MAIN rule: 50 % office occupation is MANDATORY. Who invented that: HR... :laugh:

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[BotCar]

Just for fun, have a look at this: http://imagesup.net/?di=213751878365[^]

What is this talk of release? I do not release software. My software escapes leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.

[Isfeasachme]

I remember coding basicscript (like vb) for an old Scantron machine. It had the single worst production compiler ever created. For loops would skip steps... If statements with true conditions would be ignored… My code was filled with "this should not happen…", but eventually I had to be specific just for my own sanity.

[Simon_Whale]

I did something similar in a C project while at college which had the message "Bo*****s it shouldn't get here!" and I forgot to take it out when I submitted it.

Every day, thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians. Help end the violence EAT BACON

[RafagaX]

NickPace wrote:

Should never get this message.

I prefer "If you see this, there is something terribly wrong."

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

[User 9328955]

Well, this is not a message seen in a piece of software being debugged or modified... does anybody remember that useless message "Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue." that old BIOS (AMI, I believe) used to show when they could not detect a keyboard? A long time ago, but I've seen them in old 386's and 486's. I know, I know, that was last century. ;)

[DaveBurt]

Perhaps more unhelpful is an error message that was context related and then got copy-pasted into a totally unrelated function i.e "Error in function A!" when it is really in function B :^)

[Member 4608898]

I have gotten some of those before. Had a look at the code and can't see how it could possibly get there. Normally it is an indication that something has gone awry. Possibly stack corruption or something like that. The thing is they don't normally print the if or case bits so you haven't a clue how it got there.

[IndifferentDisdain]

I've seen that one derided before, and I honestly don't think it's that bad. I read it as "your keyboard isn't plugged in, dolt. When you decide to plug it in, press F1, and I'll continue to do my thing." Maybe they should have phrased it as such.

[User 9328955]

Yes, I agree. Nevertheless, the couple of times I saw this the message itself was useless. Once, the keyboard didn't work and the other was unplugged, but plugging it didn't work until turning off and on...

[Andy Brummer]

I worked with a guy that would litter his code with assert(Date.Now < [next tuesday]), so that he would remember to remove his debug code before it hit production except when he released his assert statements to production. :-D

Curvature of the Mind now with 3D

[Argonia]

Hm, if i remember correct in c++ even if you have asserts in the code in build due of the compiler optimizations they don't get executed with validate . I don't see the problem with putting asserts and validates in code

Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true

[jeron1]

At least it gives some indication of something, as opposed to an empty catch block grrrrrrr! :mad:

[Chad3F]

An even better 'hypothetical' error message:

Monitor not detected. Turn it on to continue.

[Chad3F]

Could be worse.. something like (in C):

/* Should never get here */
exit(0);

Now there is a useful error message.. oh, wait! what message? :wtf: The sad thing is that a long time ago I came across a library that did this (just outright exited the program, rather than return an error code to the caller). :sigh:

[James Lonero]

This is probably because the programmer didn't know how to handle the error or what to do with it.

[Lutoslaw]

Here on Code Project somebody made an excellent point about empty catches: This piece of code

try {
SaveUserData();
}
catch
{
}

is equivalent to:

try {
//SaveUserData(); -- if it can fail silently, then why care?
}
catch
{
}

Greetings - Jacek

[Lutoslaw]

All programming is about handling errors. A whole life is about handling errors, actually. I bet the programmer was a no-lifer. ;)

Greetings - Jacek