54
CWins
7y

"Errors? Won't happen to me!"

One of my first jobs was to finish and maintain a program, that was made by a guy who had a real genius image among others. Years later, people said "oh him, that smart guy."

I never met him, but that's what i heard.

However, he was not only smart, but it seems he was also very confident. That's what i deduct from his code.

He didn't use catch-blocks. They were all empty. Not even logged.

If errors appeared , it was not possible to see what happened and where and why. The program would continue it's execution and if following steps could not work, because there had been an unnoticed exception, it would just throw another unnoticed exception and at some point, end in an undefined state.

Comments
  • 16
    I dealt with this once. It was the billing system for a major utility. It was incredible. They also mandated that all money be stored in floats. We constantly billed for a penny or so off in either direction. That system is still in production today.
  • 12
    So basically, he made sure no one noticed his mistakes be silencing his code so it never alerted anyone xD sounds like most "smart" guys to me. All about just hiding your mistakes.
  • 0
    So that code could fix itself if something went wrongπŸ˜•πŸ˜•πŸ˜•
  • 0
    I bet there were very few crashes! ;)
  • 3
    The system used some libs with unmanaged code and hardwaredrivers that did not share his love for casual exceptions.

    So, there were enough crashes.
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