A deep dive to find a nasty bug
blog.boundary.comCONCLUSION: It is a miracle computers work.
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)
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!
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
I can't get over how awesome that photo of Joe Damato is.