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by kleiba 150 days ago
"Other people" might also just be junior devs - I have seen time and again how (over-)confident newbies can be in their code. (I remember one case where a student suspected a bug in the JVM when some Java code of his caused an error.)

It's not necessarily maliciousness or laziness, it could simply be enthusiasm paired with lack of experience.
3 comments
benldrmn 150 days ago
Funny, I had a similar experience TAing “Intro to CS” (first semester C programming course). The student was certain he encountered a compiler bug (pushing back on my assumption there was something wrong with their code, since while compilers do have bugs, they are probably not in the code generation of a nested for loop). After spending a few minutes parsing their totally unindented code, the off-by-one error revealed itself
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zehaeva 150 days ago
Off topic, but I feel like this could be made into a Zen Koan from The Codeless Code[0]. You're almost there with it!

[0] https://thecodelesscode.com/

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direwolf20 149 days ago
Offer topic, but the Codeless Code isn't Zen Koans. It's formatted like Zen Koans, and it's entertaining and brings value to the world, but it isn't the same thing.
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JDye 150 days ago
Our postgres replication suddenly stopped working and it took three of us hours - maybe days - of looking through the postgres source before we actually accepted it wasn't us or our hosting provider being stupid and submitted a ticket.

I can't imagine the level of laziness or entitlement required for a student (or any developer) to blame their tools so quickly without conducting a thorough investigation.

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mr_toad 149 days ago
I had a professor who cautioned us not to assume the problem was in the compiler, or in anyone else’s code. Students assuming that there is a compiler (or similar) bug is not uncommon. Common enough he felt it necessary to pre-empt those discussions.
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xxs 150 days ago
have found bugs in native JVM, usually it takes some effort, though. Printing the assembly is the easiest one. (I consider the bug in java.lang/util/io/etc. code not an interesting case)

Memory leaks and issues with the memory allocator are months long process to pin on the JVM...

In the early days (bug parade times), the bugs are a lot more common, nowadays -- I'd say it'd be an extreme naivete to consider JVM the culprit from the get-go.

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