Explaining programming memes | Part 1

We can say that in every profession there is a language that only those working in the profession understand and its in Chinese for everyone else. There are also a lot of memes circulating among programmers, and since I am a programmer (in theory), I will explain some of them to those who are not such geeks as we are.

1. Stolen code

Programming is a good job because every problem has been solved by others. Nowadays, anyone who hasn’t learned even one gram of programming can copy an existing script. Every programmer copies everyone else’s code, so it’s not surprising if you come across a couple of identical codes in different corners of the Internet. I personally do not recommend copying and pasting, and in this post I will explain why and the most common mistakes. Worth reading!

2. Error at non-existent line

As a programmer, it often happens that you write a code with, say, 10 lines, run it and there is an error on the 20th line. In such cases, many people just hold their heads and cannot imagine why this could happen. However, there are several simple explanations for this. The first is the invisible characters. Everyone knows what space or tab is and happily uses it in their documents or code. However, they are actually in the document as a character code, which tells the operating system displaying the document what should be displayed instead of the code. Sometimes it happened to me that I downloaded a code from GitHub and it contained all existing character codes when I tried to edit it. Since I would get an undefined or syntax error when running, I had to delete them one by one and replace them with my own spaces. You can imagine how much fun it was to do this in a 500-line codebase... You can also encounter this bug when there is a problem with libraries.

3. The unsolved bug

We often spend hours trying to fix a bug. Programming is often about patience, so you don’t burn your laptop in your anger. It’s always a very bad feeling when you can’t fix something, no matter how hard you try. In many cases, I tend to use the trick of stopping the whole thing, doing something else and in time I figure out how to solve the problem. A lot of people do this, and I think that’s where this meme comes from.

4. Code doesn’t work after minor modification

I really liked watching Pingu, it’s one of the nice memories of my childhood, but that’s not what’s important here. When you’re just writing code, you just focus on making it work. Sometimes it happens that later on you realize that it could have been solved more simply without 1000 for loops or you just try to organize the unorganized code a bit. This is when, after a while, everything falls on me and no one knows who is with whom or what they are doing. Here is a very important rule to keep in mind when programming: if your code works, don’t touch it!

Well, that’s all for the first part!

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Happy coding!