What if computers just did what we wanted them to do?

[dorchadas]

Time lost to stupid mistakes in the last week:

• Typing 0 instead of 1, thus iterating over the wrong array and repeatedly getting "undefined": Three hours.


• Misplacing a bracket, causing the loop to always return true: Two hours.


• Checking the wrong function input, thus causing the function to always return false: One hour.

Programming languages are like real languages, in that a single small error totally screws everything up. I'm reminded of my Japanese lesson this week, where Aya-sensei got completely confused when I talked about making 塩鮭 (shiozake, "Salted salmon"), because 鮭, "salmon," and 酒, "alcohol," are pronounced exactly the same and I was talking about leaving it out on the counter to thaw, so she thought I had left three bottles of booze on the counter.

After those three hours lost to 0 and 1, I wish I had that booze on the counter.

Comments

[helvetica]

lol I love your facepalm emoji!

That sounds really frustrating!! I'm glad you eventually found them though haha

[dorchadas]

I have a whole folder of emoji images, and I added that one to it the instant I found it.

And yeah, the 0/1 thing was especially infuriating! But I think learning a new language (and living in a country where I didn't speak the language well) helped condition me to frustration enough that I can overcome it. Not without sometimes feeling like an idiot, though...

This Three Panel Soul comic is an excellent summary of how programming goes.

[throughdoors]

Oh jeez, those errors are so frustrating. I wound up with the weirdness of being rather good at avoiding or quickly finding those sorts of errors, so I didn't wind up learning a lot of debugging features in IDEs until I was dealing with massive weird pointer problems and stuff, and then the learning curve is a lot harder. Wheeeeee ugh.

In Japanese, other than the confusion about which word you meant, was there something you should have said to make your meaning clear?

[dorchadas]

I think there's two things I could have done.

1) Use the right counter. I think I just used the generic counter for three objects, when I should have used the counter for fish, which is clearly different from the counter for bottles and would have distinguished them.

2) Say shake, an alternate-but-also-dictionary-correct pronunciation for salmon but not for alcohol. Some people say sake, some people say shake, and I have no idea what the distinction is, if there is one, or why some people use one or the other. But it would have make it obvious.

[tuulentupa]

Augh, those are so frustrating. Nearly worth of a full workday.
With real languages people often can figure out what the speaker was attempting to say. If only computers could do that.
...but yes, small errors can change the meaning quite radically. My favorite example in Finnish is tapaan (I meet) and tapan (I kill). So are you meeting your boyfriend, or are you having a really bad fight....? xD

[dorchadas]

Oh dear!

I looked around and I also found this example from someone talking about studying Finnish:

Valita: to choose or elect

Valittaa: to complain about

Vallita: to dominate

Vallittaa: to build ramparts

Long vowels have caused me trouble in Japanese before (shujin, "husband"; shuujin, "prisoner"), so it's a little gratifying to see that the pain is more wide-spread than I thought.

[throughdoors]

Agh, counters! Korean has those too and they are not my favorite to learn, though interesting to learn about.