this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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I learned early in my software engineering career these two beautiful rules of debugging:
Unless you were the one writing the program and its error messages - then check, that you didn't mess up there...
Until you write a compiler error in some deeply templated C++ code, in which case just reading every word takes all day
/s but not too much
Addendum to 2: never believe that what they say is relevant to what's actually happening here. You have a lot of faith that the people writing error messages knew what they were doing!
Having written some error messages in a godforsaken database frontend, an error message only means that something didn't work correctly and may or may not correctly indicate what is actually wrong
I mean, if the error says "variable foo is not defined" I don't think it's wise to go "I'm pretty sure it's defined, the compiler is just wrong" 😂
I don’t know, have you ever used JavaScript? I’ve run into some really fucking weird bugs. I’ve also spent hours trying to find the source of an error message only to discover the error message was lying and caused by some other error.