 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
So I found this video:
And I thought to myself, "those poor, poor programmers". Perhaps its not their fault that bugs happen - maybe its just a fault of the system. They're victims of circumstance, and it isn't through bad habits, shoddy design, poor coding ability, or poor management that these bugs make their way into production applications... no, it isn't their fault.
So then I got to wondering. If they get punished every time one of "us" finds a bug in a publicly released product...how do they punish "us" for being the people who find the bugs in the first place? I think I've found out how they get back at us for finding all of their bugs: worthless exceptions. That's right, they punish us with worthless exceptions.
Everyone who has ever worked with classic ASP remembers the "Error occurred." and completely useless hex code that followed that message. I remember it so well, in fact, that my left eye is bulging out of its socket and their is blood running out my right ear as I type this. I'm fairly certain that, like happy little easter eggs designed solely for the benefit of programmers, these exceptions creep their way into the code while the MS programmers are rubbing their hands together and cackling "Mr.Burns"-style.
Every time a Microsoft product tosses up an "An Error has occurred." with no further englightenment forthcoming or an Office product tells me "That operation failed to complete." and gives me nothing more to satiate my curiosity as to what went wrong - a Microsoft programmer with a butt full of needles (see video) is laughing his (or her) ass off in Redmond, sprouting a fresh pair of wings with which to escape the torture chamber created by us, the end users. I can just imagine the satisfaction on their face as they shout, "Debug that you whining bastard!" as they get their new wings.
Note to the curious: Mythology develops so that the uninformed can explain the mystical. What lies beyond the grasp of the mind of the viewer is often thought of as magic or mythology. The greek scholars like Archimedes built machines like the "automatic oracle" where the bird would whistle (a simple warbling whistle) if good fortune was headed your way ... so long as you provided a decent fee up front. I cannot personally explain why so many error messages in the products I use on a daily basis have absolutely no detail, nor do they pretend to be anything more than worthless statements of facts such as "The system has crashed." or "An error has occurred.". Since I can't explain why anyone would accidentally leave such nebulous error messages floating around the innards of an application, I must create my own mythology to explain it so that I can sleep better at night. Knowing that Microsoft programmers are getting their revenge for being jabbed in the butt by the bug-reporting software is comforting to me somehow.
