Funny Conversation



  • I work in a small office and I was just passing by the office of the
    director of development on the way to the water cooler. I saw one of
    our less competent programmers standing in his office in a conversation
    with him and overheard the following (wish I could've been there for
    the whole thing)



    Director of development: "Are you saying that Oracle does not handle dates correctly? Because if that is the case..."



    This was all I was able to hear while I was passing by.



    I can just imagine that the programmer had some illogical excuse as to
    why one of his programs was not working properly and was blaming it on
    Oracle.



    As I said, I would've loved to be there to hear what the programmer
    said to cause the director of dev to say that and I would've liked even
    more to hear the rest of he conversation.



    Good for a little laugh nonetheless.



  • @ferrengi said:

    I work in a small office and I was just passing by the office of the
    director of development on the way to the water cooler. I saw one of
    our less competent programmers standing in his office in a conversation
    with him and overheard the following (wish I could've been there for
    the whole thing)



    Director of development: "Are you saying that Oracle does not handle dates correctly? Because if that is the case..."



    This was all I was able to hear while I was passing by.



    I can just imagine that the programmer had some illogical excuse as to
    why one of his programs was not working properly and was blaming it on
    Oracle.



    As I said, I would've loved to be there to hear what the programmer
    said to cause the director of dev to say that and I would've liked even
    more to hear the rest of he conversation.



    Good for a little laugh nonetheless.

    I used to work with at guy like that. I joined an ongoing (struts/J2EE) project and started asking some ... "probing" questions, and told me that the reason every form input name was in lower case was that struts/web-stuff/etc couldn't handle upper case...

    He actually wrote code to manually copy stuff into his form beans, for example: "form.setUserId(request.getParameter("userid"));"...



  • @Fred said:



    and told me that the reason every form input name was ...




    and he told me...



    sorry...






  • @Fred said:

    @ferrengi said:
    I work in a small office and I was just passing by the office of the
    director of development on the way to the water cooler. I saw one of
    our less competent programmers standing in his office in a conversation
    with him and overheard the following (wish I could've been there for
    the whole thing)



    Director of development: "Are you saying that Oracle does not handle dates correctly? Because if that is the case..."



    This was all I was able to hear while I was passing by.



    I can just imagine that the programmer had some illogical excuse as to
    why one of his programs was not working properly and was blaming it on
    Oracle.



    As I said, I would've loved to be there to hear what the programmer
    said to cause the director of dev to say that and I would've liked even
    more to hear the rest of he conversation.



    Good for a little laugh nonetheless.

    I used to work with at guy like that. I joined an ongoing (struts/J2EE)
    project and started asking some ... "probing" questions, and told me
    that the reason every form input name was in lower case was that
    struts/web-stuff/etc couldn't handle upper case... He actually wrote
    code to manually copy stuff into his form beans, for example:
    "form.setUserId(request.getParameter("userid"));"...




    Wish I knew more about this stuff so I could fully understand the
    stupidity here but it sounds like this guy was able to produce a lot of
    unnecessary and incorrect code.



  • Back in the early/middle 90's I worked with a chap who wrote (very badly) Clipper applications. All of his applications regularly resulted in corrupted data and he assured me that this would remain the case until such time as I allowed him to write his own replacement operating system that would no longer corrupt disks every time it ran.

    Suffice it to say that he left the company a couple of months later. His replacement resolved the problem very quickly by opening all of the index files every time he wrote to a data file instead of opening the ones that he thought he needed at the time!



  • @Martin said:

    Back in the early/middle 90's I worked with a
    chap who wrote (very badly) Clipper applications. All of his
    applications regularly resulted in corrupted data and he assured me
    that this would remain the case until such time as I allowed him to
    write his own replacement operating system that would no longer corrupt
    disks every time it ran.

    Suffice it to say that he left the company a couple of months later. His replacement resolved the problem very quickly by opening all of the index files every time he wrote to a data file instead of opening the ones that he thought he needed at the time!



    HA! That's great. My program doesn't work so let me replace the operating system??!!
    If he can't get a program to work, how does he expect that he will be able to design and program his own operating system and get it to work properly?
    Even if he did, doesn't that mean that everyone would have to install his operating system before they could use any of his programs?

    That's probably the last thing our programmer would suggest. I'm thinking that he probably blamed his problem on Oracle so he could just say something like: "It's not my problem so I don't have to spend any more time or effort on this issue".


  • For almost one year, I've had a bug in one of my programs which made it sporadically crash on Windows while it worked well
    on Linux. I was unsure whether to blame the used libs, the environment or the operating system for that. Today I've found it:

    #ifndef WIN32
                                    iconv(icd, &p1, &l1, &p2, &l2);
    #else
                                    while(p1) {
                                            / filter NON-ASCII */
                                            if (*p1>=32 && *p1<=127)
                                                    *p2++ = *p1;
                                            p1++;
                                    }
    #endif


    Note the length check (l2 is the length of the buffer p2 points to) missing in the WIN32 section...

    Now I have to go to the blackboard and write 100 times: No, the compiler ain't broken. No, the libs ain't broken. No, the OS ain't broken. ... ;-)



  • @ammoQ said:

    For almost one year, I've had a bug in one of my programs which made it sporadically crash on Windows while it worked well
    on Linux. I was unsure whether to blame the used libs, the environment or the operating system for that. Today I've found it:

    #ifndef WIN32
                                    iconv(icd, &p1, &l1, &p2, &l2);
    #else
                                    while(p1) {
                                            / filter NON-ASCII */
                                            if (*p1>=32 && *p1<=127)
                                                    *p2++ = *p1;
                                            p1++;
                                    }
    #endif


    Note the length check (l2 is the length of the buffer p2 points to) missing in the WIN32 section...

    Now I have to go to the blackboard and write 100 times: No, the compiler ain't broken. No, the libs ain't broken. No, the OS ain't broken. ... ;-)


    Sometimes, though, there can be bugs in the programming language. At my office, we use PowerBuilder and the entire GUI (at least in version 9, 6.5 was much better) seems like one big WTF and it is extremely slow on top of it.
    Oh, the reason why I mentioned this is that there have been issues with the PowerBuilder interacts with the database. Particularly Oracle 8.



  • @ferrengi said:

    @ammoQ said:
    For almost one year, I've
    had a bug in one of my programs which made it sporadically crash on
    Windows while it worked well
    on Linux. I was unsure whether to blame the used libs, the environment or the operating system for that. Today I've found it:

    #ifndef WIN32
                                    iconv(icd, &p1, &l1, &p2, &l2);
    #else
                                    while(p1) {
                                            / filter NON-ASCII */
                                            if (*p1>=32 && *p1<=127)
                                                    *p2++ = *p1;
                                            p1++;
                                    }
    #endif


    Note the length check (l2 is the length of the buffer p2 points to) missing in the WIN32 section...

    Now
    I have to go to the blackboard and write 100 times: No, the compiler
    ain't broken. No, the libs ain't broken. No, the OS ain't broken. ...
    ;-)


    Sometimes, though, there can be bugs in the
    programming language. At my office, we use PowerBuilder and the entire
    GUI (at least in version 9, 6.5 was much better) seems like one big WTF
    and it is extremely slow on top of it.
    Oh, the reason why I
    mentioned this is that there have been issues with the PowerBuilder
    interacts with the database. Particularly Oracle 8.




    people still use PowerBuilder?



    I remember my first job professionally was converting a PowerBuilder app to a J2EE web application....

    Don't really remember much about powerbuilder, but if the user
    encounters an error while using the original application, one of the
    most common error messages I saw was "Error. Contact programmer."


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