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Wordle 373 2/6
⬛🟨⬛🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
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Wordle 373 4/6
🟨⬛🟨⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟨🟩🟨
⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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A piece of code I wrote 15 years ago hit its first error, ever. Turned out that a different department broke their own rules on the format of a shared configuration file.
Add a few more defensive checks as I plan to be retired before it happens again.
I am sure that Honey would have solved this with a state table!
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I thought I made an error once, but I was mistaken.
Will Rogers never met me.
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In a similar vein: People who think they know it all really annoy those of us who do.
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Ive got a T-towel with that on.
Andy
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Lol ... i.e. I never tell the truth.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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In my first university course on programming, we handed in 'coding sheets', which were copied to punch cards by a group of ladies having card punching as their meaning of life. (At least of working life.) Then they put the card decks into the batch job entry system for the huge mainframe. A day later, the job had been run, and we could pick up the listing (from both the compilation and run, if compilation was successful) and the card deck from the handout shelves.
Those ladies were certainly not perfect, error free typists. And, in rush periods, it could take two days before the mainframe got around to run our job. So we grumbled a lot ...
Around Christmas time, after four mandatory hand-in coding exercises, one of the girls in my class couldn't understand our grumbling. Who cares if it takes a couple of days before you get the results? What is really this thing about 'error messages'?? We slowly realized that after half a year as a programming student (with no prior coding experience), she had never made a single coding error, neither in syntax nor semantics, in any of the four exercises. Furthermore, the typing ladies had not made a single typo when copying her coding sheets. So after a full semester, she didn't have a clue about what an error message is! We tried to explain it to her, and she had problems understanding why we didn't fix such errors before handing in the coding sheets.
When she left the room, the rest of us where very much in agreement: She had been missing out on some very important learning experiences 
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trønderen wrote: So after a full semester, she didn't have a clue about what an error message is!
Well, she could have been one of the super-programmers you occasionally hear about. I would be interested of knowing how her studies (and career) progressed...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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We had to do much the same in college, except that we had to punch our own cards. All in all, it wasn't a big challenge, if one didn't mind having to arrive at school at 3 AM to find an available machine. But speaking of errors, I tried creating one program in COBOL; IIRC, it was 83 lines, but managed to spew 107 errors. Even the COBOL expert in the white coat who worked in the computer center couldn't find a single error in my code. I never tried COBOL again, since FORTRAN was all the school required us to learn.
Will Rogers never met me.
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trønderen wrote: ...she had problems understanding why we didn't fix such errors before handing in the coding sheets.
Maybe she was a fan of one of Knuth's famous quotes.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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trønderen wrote: So after a full semester, she didn't have a clue about what an error message is
Sounds like a case of "on error resume next"... 
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Sometimes when I don't get bug reports from my software I wonder if it's even being used 
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Maybe there is a bug in sending the bug reports.
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My observation is that if nobody is reporting any problem in a new feature, it's not because it's bug-free, it's because it's not being used.
Then wait 6 months (after you've forgotten all the important details), then someone will find something and it'll take you forever to get re-acquainted with your own code...
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One of the things that really helps me when coding in C++ with templates is I can easily visualize the result of the template expansion/instantiation as raw C++ (no templates)
When I'm coding in C++ I can visualize the equivalent C as I'm coding.
I can also to a degree, visualize the assembly. Not in any specific sense, but in a sort of pseudo-code like "I know when we're doing a shift, an add, and a push here" kind of thing.
I do this to a lesser degree in C# even, when I'm considering performance. I think about C++ code required to get it to do the same thing - but like I said to a lesser degree.
Do you do this? I'm just curious. It feels like such a blessing sometimes.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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I have a good sense of what's happening underneath and will think about it if it seems important.
I never coded in C but spent a lot of time in a proprietary, procedural language that might be described as a cross between Modula and a stripped down Ada. We sometimes implemented polymorphism, inheritance, and encapsulation manually, so how OO languages did it wasn't a surprise.
Having to parse and instantiate the code for templates significantly improved my understanding of what was going on there.
My most recent experience actually writing assembler was on the PDP-10 😲, but what happens in the depths hasn't changed much. Once in a while, I'd like to step into x64 assembler to see what the O/S is doing, but I can't follow it very well. Maybe someday it'll be important enough that I get my butt in gear and dig into it.
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Greg Utah said: I'd like to step into x64 assembler to see what the O/S is doing, but I can't follow it very well. Maybe someday it'll be important enough that I get my butt in gear and dig into it.
If you decide to learn x64 assembly, take a look at this new release & fantastic book (which I am reading bits at a time):
The Art of 64-Bit Assembly, Volume 1: x86-64 Machine Organization and Programming [^]
Really great book, by a master author.
Is anyone else working their way through it?
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I have a vague memory of working with the older Visual Studio versions (pre-. Net), and it provided a view of the actual machine code as you were debugging, and you could step through at that level. I found that quite useful at times.
Is that still available when working with C++ in VS? It's been a long time since I worked with that...
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It exists for C++ in VS 2017 (what I'm using at present for maintaining an older project) - Debug | Windows | Disassembly. I don't know if you can do the equivalent (see the IL?) in C# or similar...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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It's still there in VS2022, and you can step into code for which you don't have the source.
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I call it the x-ray vision. I look at some code and visualize the code approximately how it will be when it runs.
Common? Probably not. I came to C and C# etc from an assembly background, but most programmers nowadays do not. Hence why they're happy to use constructs that are "nice on the surface but gross underneath".
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I don't use a "UI designer" in WPF or UWP; it's all XAML and / or code for my UI. I can visualize the whole visual tree.
I can't do the same in Windows Forms; you "need" the UI designer (IMO).
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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A similar situation: I met a young software developer, almost completely blind (he had a very narrow tunnel vision), so he did all software development using a Braille line, where he could read a single line at a time by stroking his fingertips over the Braille line. He had the entire source code inside his head.
I willingly admit that I think it a great help to see an entire method at a glance on the screen or printout. I would be using a screen even if I had the mental capability to keep every source line in my head.
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Don't you remember ed[^]? I used to write assembler using ed and everything was in my head. Now, if I have to work with a single monitor, I start complaining. I became such an wimp!
Mircea
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