Tuesday, November 20, 2012

What Programmers Say When Their Programs Don’t Work

Someone posted this to Facebook the other day. I have to admit that I have said several of these and heard most of them. I suspect a lot of these are also said by students when asked about why their projects don’t work.

Top 20 replied

I’ve said '”That’s weird” a lot. It’s a sort of placeholder while I try to think of what could have done wrong. Number 2 actually makes sense if you think it is in the context of “where in the program where you” as in what else was going on. It’s a valid question.

5 comments:

PiRX said...

#15 makes sense too. At least when you know that crash is caused by wrong input.

Alfred Thompson said...

#15 dies make sense but it could be stated more diplomatically. The word "wrong" could be left out while getting at the same information.

Fadi E. (itoctopus) said...

Hi Alfred,

I love all these excuses.

The one that I hear a lot is: "Has any other programmer worked on this?"

Programmers are artists when it comes to avoiding responsibility/accountability for their code.

By the way, the "That's weird" excuse is usually the first excuse - and then the programmer tries to find other people to blame!

Thanks a lot for sharing!

Unknown said...

what do you mean with #15 makes sense???...

they ALL make sense!

KFunk said...

Step 2 makes sense if you look at it from the view that we all remember where we were or what we were doing when some noteworthy event happened. For example the Kennedy assassination an when the Challenger blew up.