Excel wrongly assuming the year 1900 was a leap year for their timestamps is my favorite bug that will never be fixed because everyone has built workarounds for this already
Reminds me when I was working with a guy and he named a database table
recieved
. I had adapted my code to that, and then one day without warning he renamed it toreceived
- and it took us an hour to figure out why everything broke.Our Python virtual environments at work on all Linux-servers are in the directory /opt/vens instead of /opt/venvs so when some intern corrects that, we will be screwed!
had a co-worker once who called the variable holding the first record in a complicated workflow “rec1st” and the last record “reclst”, unaware that in every font used by every code editor except his, a lowercase l and number 1 look identical.
i spent a day debugging that after he quit.
No good code font would make
1
andl
look identical. Character differentiability is like the most important thing.Look, JetBrains did it right.
The fact that they mention using EMACS makes it even funnier
I wrote code for industrial automation years ago (think assembly line machines). I was reviewing production code and found a stupid bug and fixed it, then reinstalled. The motors moved incorrectly - I don’t recall if that was the time it smashed glass everywhere, but “fixing” the code definitely broke the program. I could not figure out why…but due to time constraints I sadly had reinsert the bug to put the machine back in production.
Some nights that still bothers me.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Donald Knuth’s webpage states the line was used to end a memo entitled Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion (1977)