

A deep dive to find a nasty bug - ice799
http://blog.boundary.com/2012/04/04/a-deep-dive-to-find-a-nasty-bug/

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mrb_bk
CONCLUSION: It is a miracle computers work.

~~~
Foy
No kidding!

On a related note, it's always fun to demonstrate code's sensitivity to minor
alterations to a non-technical person and see their reactions.

For example, just remove a semi-colon from a random PHP file that gets
included in your web app and watch it completely die.

It's a decent way to impress upon people with little technical knowledge the
importance of debugging.

(bonus points if you can create an impressive runtime bug that mangles the
code's functionality in a flashy way, think mis-spelled variables in PHP)

~~~
evincarofautumn
If you (rightly) preserve code’s sensitivity to alteration for the sake of the
computer, then you also have a responsibility to offer clear diagnostics to
the programmer. Clang gets this right: people make mistakes, and often they’re
hard to spot—no need to make it harder!

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jfarmer
If you've never worked with Joe, this is the kind of nonsense he does in his
sleep.

I first worked with Joe four years ago. He joined the team knowing no Ruby.
What did he do his first week? Diagnose and patch a pretty big bug in MRI's
threading implementation.

His blog is equally intense: <http://timetobleed.com>

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janaboruta
I can't get over how awesome that photo of Joe Damato is.

