The crazy thing is that sometimes it works (e.g. because your Makefile is wrong or you've got weird preprocessor stuff going on that takes a couple of iterations to fully compute).
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
570 points (97.0% liked)
Programmer Humor
32356 readers
1215 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
or it could also be that you happen to be lucky enough the crash was just an occurrence that happens 1/20 times, in which case the problem still persists but... at least it sort of runs perfectly fine, 95% of the time
Bug closed "it works on my machine" also known as NMFP 👐
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results"
The times when it works just reinforce the act of trying it again and again
Or because you must have been Hitler in a previous life and now have to use Delphi, which sometimes falls over with internal compiler errors that might resolve themselves, but sometimes needs an IDE restart, and sometimes a full machine reboot with no rhyme or fucking reason to any of it.
Oh, I feel for you... Delphi is a really nice language... for 1995. Last I saw it used in anger was back in 2004 or so, and even then it was a joke that it was still going...
I think fucking Access is still around.
Intermittent rewards are a hell of a drug.
Look! I know this code is correct! OKAY!
What freaks me out is that sometimes getting the error message more than once can reset parts of the programmer's brain enough to be able to see the error that "wasn't there" before. And what's equally freaky is how often the programmer then forgets what the error even was once it's fixed.
This is personal experience of course. For me, being introspective about this is kind of like remembering Dr Who's The Silence exist when they're not right there, but somehow it can be done.
They will eventually run out of errors