Programming Brain-Cramp

In the spirit of trying to drum up some fun discussion, I ask you the following:

Do you have a particular programming brain-cramp or faux-pax that stands out? Mine, was just this past weekend.

I am in the building a tool based around OpenSSH. So, I have this routine:


  my $failedActivation = 0;

  sub activateFirstCluster
    {
     
  my $offlineStatus;

   if ($failedActivations eq  3 ) 
  {

  $offlineStatus = &executeTaskSequence($clusterHost, @offLineSequence
+);

  }
  else
    {

    $command = "/bin/ls";
                          
    ($error = &runSystemCommand($command)) && $failedActivations++;

  print "failed $failedActivations times\n";

    return $success;
  }

    }
[download]

So, as part of my testing, I deliberately injected an error, by specifying $command = " /bin/l ". I was going nuts trying to figure out why my counter wouldn't increment. About an hour or so later, it dawns on me that my system alias for " ls " is " l ".

At the time I thought it was pretty funny. But somebody's gotta have a better one than that.

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Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by blakem (Monsignor) on Aug 20, 2001 at 08:25 UTC
How about spending an hour debugging a .c file only to realize that your Makefile isn't even pointing at it... Doh! -Blake	[reply]
Re: Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by Hanamaki (Chaplain) on Aug 20, 2001 at 22:07 UTC
Allready done! Allways good to hear, that there are other people like me:-) Hanamaki	[reply]
Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by SparkeyG (Curate) on Aug 20, 2001 at 08:42 UTC
How's this for you? Late night programming back at University, I got the project to compile and respond properly to test data. Success thought I. Since the prof took of points for style of code, I figured I would clean up the code... After cleaning up the code, removing debug print statements, renaming varibles from c1 to innerLoopCounter, and the like, the code compiled. I turned in the project, took the test, and as I was leaving the TA took me aside and asked why I had turned in a non-working project. I was confused, it worked last night... Ended up scouring 2.5kloc for wtf I did wrong when I tried to 'clean up' the code. Ended up I had renamed the same var in two different places. DOH!!!! The lesson for the day? -- Don't fix, what ain't broken. --SparkeyG	[reply]
Re: Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by Anonymous Monk on Aug 21, 2001 at 05:27 UTC
I'd say that the lesson that day was "Use real var names during development"	[reply]
Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by maverick (Curate) on Aug 20, 2001 at 09:11 UTC
Here's one a co-worker of mine ran into the other day `package Foo; # some code =pod some docs. 1;` [download] /\/\averick perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by RhetTbull (Curate) on Aug 20, 2001 at 20:31 UTC
Two things I've done that both drove me nuts. The first was, while editing a C file, I dropped into the shell to do something, got distracted and forgot what I was originally working on so I fired up the editor again, made a couple hours worth of changes then saved and went one my merry way. Later I discovered the original instance of the editor, saved my work (doh!) and exited only to find out I'd wiped out the last couple hours worth of work by saving the old file over the new one! The second thing (and sadly this took me two days to discover) was debugging an old Fortran program that dealt with time. I had accidently used the variable "M" as both month and minute. Drove me crazy trying to figure out why the program worked sometimes and not others. I now use very descriptive variable names ;-)	[reply]
Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by Maclir (Curate) on Aug 20, 2001 at 20:36 UTC
Man oh man - where do I begin? In 25 years of programming one accumulates lots of "brain fade" cases. One of the best - and earliest - was berating another IBM OS/370 assembler programmer about his "forgetfullness" in omitting the standard "restore register contents" macro call at the end of a subprogram. Then he told me to look at the only executable line in the subroutine - it was a SVC (supervisor call) to generate a system abend - to produce a full core dump when requested. So the routine never even got to return to the calling program. Self exits stage left, with a red face.	[reply]
Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by dws (Chancellor) on Aug 20, 2001 at 21:58 UTC
Often, when starting a new job, I've had to dive into poorly structured legacy code. To understand it, I'll take some scenario, and try to trace it through the code. On finding a suspect routine, I used to stop and look for callers, and then backtrack into them. I stopped doing this a couple of years ago after learning that I'd just spent the better part of a week examining unreachable ("oh, we stopped using that stuff a while back") code. Bah! Oh, and I get burned by naming a program/script `test` about once a year. On Unix systems, this can be a momentary heart-stopper.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by RedDog (Pilgrim) on Aug 21, 2001 at 05:45 UTC
That's why I name mine testing.pl ;-) RedDog	[reply]
Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by mrmick (Curate) on Aug 20, 2001 at 17:51 UTC
How about using perlcc on a perl program only to find out that, apparently, the inclusion of socket modules generate these types of messages: `No definition for sub Socket::MSG_EOF (unable to autoload)` [download] I just came across this last Friday and am still trying to figure it out (or rather, how to fix it). ... cramp is still there ... :-) Mick	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by adamcrussell (Hermit) on Aug 20, 2001 at 20:28 UTC
My worst experiences have been in the "wrong file" classication. In fact, just a couple of days ago I was pulling my hair out wondering why my extensive sendmail.cf changes were not being implemented properly by the sendmail daemon. Reason: I was editing the wrong fricking sendmail.cf >:(	[reply]
Re: Programming Brain-Cramp by dthacker (Deacon) on Aug 21, 2001 at 16:44 UTC
Wondering why a `split / +/, myfile` wasn't working when reading a *.conf file. Seems the file was tab delimited.... I have so much to learn :) Dave	[reply] [d/l]

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