A deep dive to find a nasty bug

http://blog.boundary.com/2012/04/04/a-deep-dive-to-find-a-nasty-bug/

by ice799 • 14 years ago

77 5 14 years ago

blog.boundary.com

mrb_bk• 14 years ago

CONCLUSION: It is a miracle computers work.

Foy• 14 years ago

No kidding!

On a related note, it's always fun to demonstrate code's sensitivity to minor alterations to a non-technical person and see their reactions.

For example, just remove a semi-colon from a random PHP file that gets included in your web app and watch it completely die.

It's a decent way to impress upon people with little technical knowledge the importance of debugging.

(bonus points if you can create an impressive runtime bug that mangles the code's functionality in a flashy way, think mis-spelled variables in PHP)

evincarofautumn• 14 years ago

If you (rightly) preserve code’s sensitivity to alteration for the sake of the computer, then you also have a responsibility to offer clear diagnostics to the programmer. Clang gets this right: people make mistakes, and often they’re hard to spot—no need to make it harder!

janaboruta• 14 years ago

I can't get over how awesome that photo of Joe Damato is.

jfarmer• 14 years ago

If you've never worked with Joe, this is the kind of nonsense he does in his sleep.

I first worked with Joe four years ago. He joined the team knowing no Ruby. What did he do his first week? Diagnose and patch a pretty big bug in MRI's threading implementation.

His blog is equally intense: http://timetobleed.com

A deep dive to find a nasty bug

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