milestone of compilation errors

[Prroffessorr Fir Kenobi]

I recently get some thought about some
programming milestone:

I remember when i was a newbie compile errors
scary me: i was newer sure if i will be able to
mend them, what some mean, how to ment them

with years they become less scary and finally
quite recently i found the situation that compile
errors are like absolute zero-scary (they are only like underscore in english syntax checker)

I found this situation as a some kind of programming milestone.. wonder if others
go also thru that and WHEN they pass thru such
milesone (how may years ago)

maybe some other seen milestones you find important on the way of becoming more advanced programmer?

[Paavo Helde]

Prroffessorr Fir Kenobi <profes...@gmail.com> wrote in
news:1452d5ad-ea5a-4dc5...@googlegroups.com:

> I recently get some thought about some
> programming milestone:
>
> I remember when i was a newbie compile errors
> scary me: i was newer sure if i will be able to
> mend them, what some mean, how to ment them

Compiler errors are a way how the compiler writers try to help me in
developing programs, why on earth they should scary me?

> I found this situation as a some kind of programming milestone..
> wonder if others go also thru that and WHEN they pass thru such
> milesone (how may years ago)
>
> maybe some other seen milestones you find important on the way of
> becoming more advanced programmer?

Maybe when I really understood that any code which is not properly covered
by unit tests is deemed to get rotten and buggy in a very short timeframe
(especially when it is a part of an actively developed large project or
system, of course, but that's basically all I do).

Cheers
Paavo

[Prroffessorr Fir Kenobi]

well they scared me in older times..
right now for example protection-fault
crashes can scary me a bit* (though not much -
more probably im scared by library imcompatinbilities, (potential) lack of documentations and such things

but maybe im too easily scared

* doeas maybe someone know how to setup
a handler for such things as sse misalignment
fault to get as much info as i can get?
(win32/mingw)

[Vir Campestris]

On 18/08/2015 20:05, Paavo Helde wrote:
> Compiler errors are a way how the compiler writers try to help me in
> developing programs, why on earth they should scary me?

I've seen template compilation errors that scare me.

Because I know I'll have to spend the next 15 minutes decoding what was
actually wrong.

Andy

[Prroffessorr Fir Kenobi]

ye thats the main reason of being scared - you will spend sometimes undefinite amount of time
on aggreviating error repairs

im most scared when begining to set in motion some new things with a lot of potential pitfalls

[Jens Thoms Toerring]

I had several cases lately where, for a single mistake (I think
it was a missing comma or something trivial like that), the com-
piler spewed about 1800 lines of error messages at me (and
most lines were several hundreds of characters wide). Ok, that
was in conjunction with boost::python, but there was no chance
of ever "decoding" that, not even using the tactic of "let's
skip everything that looks like gibberish and concentrate on
the first line that seems to make a bit of sense";-) Not really
scary but a bit annoying. Sometimes I wouldn't mind having a
compiler flag to request "tone it down a bit on the details,
I don't need to be reminded 500 times what a std::string is
in all the gory details" to be able to see the actual trees in
all of that forest...
Regards, Jens
--
\ Jens Thoms Toerring ___ j...@toerring.de
\__________________________ http://toerring.de

[Paavo Helde]

Vir Campestris <vir.cam...@invalid.invalid> wrote in
news:q5Gdnd8u4ZeKDk7I...@brightview.co.uk:

That's counterproductive. There is a simple way how to fix scary template
compile errors: first, try to add 'typename' somewhere; if not helping, try
to add 'template' somewhere; if all else fails, google for how the template
should actually be written.

I'm only half-joking!

Cheers
Paavo

[Richard]

[Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

Prroffessorr Fir Kenobi <profes...@gmail.com> spake the secret code
<1452d5ad-ea5a-4dc5...@googlegroups.com> thusly:

>I remember when i was a newbie compile errors
>scary me: i was newer sure if i will be able to
>mend them, what some mean, how to ment them

This came up recently as an issue with the C++ language track on
exercism.io:
<https://github.com/exercism/exercism.io/issues/2407#issuecomment-105746324>

My intention was to add the advice I mentioned on that comment as part
of the documentation for the language track. This is pretty generic
advice for C/C++ programming, that I had assumed was already present,
but I keep running into people who have no idea of how to cope with
the messages presented to them by the compiler.
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