El Blog de Trespams

Ahir estava mirant la presentació de James Bennet a la DjangoCon anomenada "UR DOIN IT WRONG" i me'n vaig adonar que feia referència a una sèrie de màximes tipus:

#11919 No. You must believe the ERROR MESSAGE. You MUST believe the error message.

La conferència és molt bona, us la recoman. El cas, però, és que em va picar la curiositat i vaig seguir l'enllaç fins a arribar a una entrada de comp.lang.perl.misc del març del 2002 on Mark Jason Dominus feia una relació de consells que ell tenia a un arxiu anomenat File of Good Advice.

Les màximes, encara que plenes de sentit comú, tenen una mala llet considerable, i m'han recordat al nostre metge de la tele favorit. Supòs que no desapareixeran de la xarxa, però per si un cas les torn a escriure aquí. Ha passat temps, però la majoria són perfectament aplicables! Esper que les disfruteu tant com jo ho he fet.

#11900 You cannot just paste code with no understanding of what is going on and expect it to work.

#11901 You can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, Retardo!

#11902 You said it didn't work, but you didn't say what it would have done if it *had* worked. #11903 What are you really trying to accomplish here?

#11904 Who the fuck cares which one is faster?

#11905 Now is the time in our program where you look at the manual.

#11906 Look at the error message! Look at the error message!

#11907 Looking for a compiler bug is the strategy of LAST resort. LAST resort.

#11908 Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

#11909 Bad programmer! No cookie!

#11910 I see you omitted $! from the error message. It won't tell you what went wrong if you don't ask it to.

#11911 You wrote the same thing twice here. The cardinal rule of programming is that you never ever write the same thing twice.

#11912 Evidently it's important to you to get the wrong answer as quickly as possible.

#11913 Gee, I don't know. I wonder what the manual says about that?

#11914 Well, no duh. That's because you ignored the error message, dimwit.

#11915 Only Sherlock Holmes can debug the program by pure deduction from the output. You are not Sherlock Holmes. Run the fucking debugger already.

#11916 Always ignore the second error message unless the meaning is obvious. #11917 Read. Learn. Evolve.

#11918 Well, then get one that *does* do auto-indent. You can't do good work with bad tools. #11919 No. You must believe the ERROR MESSAGE. You MUST believe the error message.

#11920 The error message is the Truth. The error message is God.

#11921 It could be anything. Too bad you didn't bother to diagnose the error, huh?

#11922 You don't suppress error messages, you dumbass, you PAY ATTENTION and try to understand them.

#11923 Never catch a signal except as a last resort.

#11924 Well, if you don't know what it does, why did you put it in your program? #11925 Gosh, that wasn't very bright, was it?

#11926 That's like taking a crap on someone's doorstep and then ringing the doorbell to ask for toilet paper.

#11927 A good approach to that problem would be to hire a computer programmer.

#11928 First get a book on programming. Then read it. Then write the program.

#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.

#11930 Would you like to see my rate card?

#11931 I think you are asking the wrong question here.

#11932 Holy cow.

#11933 Because it's a syntax error.

#11934 Because this is Perl, not C.

#11935 Because this is Perl, not Lisp.

#11936 Because that's the way it is.

#11937 Because.

#11938 If you have `some weird error', the problem is probably with your frobnitzer.

#11939 Because the computer cannot read your mind. Guess what? I cannot read your mind *either*.

#11940 You said `It doesn't work'. The next violation will be punished by death.

#11941 Of course it doesn't work! That's because you don't know what you are doing!

#11942 Sure, but you have to have some understanding also.

#11943 Ah yes, and you are the first person to have noticed this bug since 1987. Sure.

#11944 Yes, that's what it's supposed to do when you say that.

#11945 Well, what did you expect?

#11946 Perhaps you have forgotten that this is an engineering discipline, not some sort of black magic.

#11947 You know, this sort of thing is amenable to experimental observation.

#11948 Perhaps your veeblefitzer is clogged.

#11949 What happens when you try?

#11950 Now you are just being superstitious.

#11951 Your question has exceeded the system limit for pronouns in a single sentence. Please dereference and try again.

#11952 In my experience that is a bad strategy, because the people who ask such questions are the ones who paste the answer into their program without understanding it and then complain that it `does not work'.

#11953 Of course, this is a heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work.

#11954 If your function is written correctly, it will handle an empty array the same way as a nonempty array.

#11955 When in doubt, use brute force.

#11956 Well, it might be more intuitive that way, but it would also be useless.

#11957 Show the code.

#11958 The bug is in you, not in Perl.

#11959 Cargo-cult.

#11960 So you threw in some random punctuation for no particular reason, and then you didn't get the result you expected. Hmmmm.

#11961 How should I know what is wrong when I haven't even seen the code? I am not clairvoyant.

#11962 How should I know how to do what you want when you didn't say what you wanted to do?

#11963 It's easy to get the *wrong* answer in O(1) time.

#11964 I guess this just goes to show that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink it.

#11999 You are a stupid asshole. Shut the fuck up.