#programming hell

[uguardian]

Oh for the love of pete...

Just discovered that there's a memory leak / crash bug in the editor. This shouldn't wait until I feel like fixing it weeks from now, so guess it's back to code for a bit...

[locally-normal]

I work at a place which uses a lot of tcl for scripting. Tcl is a language no one knows or cares about, for good reason (except python supports tkinter graphics, which use Tk, which is tcl).

A recent version of tcl decided to be all hip and add some functional programming concepts like a map function for lists, named lmap.

Except there's no lambdas.

So you just pass map a blob of code, and it executes it in a for loop in *your* stack frame.

Soo if you call map in your function foo, the little lambda has full access to foo's locals. Just for shits and giggles.

And why would you have a "filter" function when you have map? Just put a 'continue' in the body of your "lambda" and it'll skip that list value. Put a 'break' and it will stop the map.

And if you put a 'return' in your lambda, innocently, well, the calling function will return. That's right you can return from foo while inside a call to map.

And no one complains because tcl just never respects stack frames it pulls this sort of shit all over the place.

For bonus points, "return" actually takes multiple arguments: you can tell it how many stack frames up you want to jump.

[uguardian]

The "fun" thing about reviewing and documenting your own code is that you'll occasionally find mistakes caused by small oversights or different portions of the code being made at different times.

So far I've removed like seven files and corrected a dozen little bugs that only existed in rare edge cases that nobody would think about.

To be blunt, this is more exhausting than coding the program in the first place.

Twenty one files done, forty six files to go.

[attibar]

You know what's worse than software by Apple?

Having to develop the code for iOS apps using said software.

It was supposed to be simple: port my work's native Android app onto iOS like we do for many of our apps. This one in particular delt with combining videos and overlaying chosen music over it. Our lead iOS developer had left and found a different job several months back, in retrospect that should've been a warning.

I'm the main Android app developer at our work and got assigned to get better at iOS development for this. But Apple, my fucking god Apple. It's not even a matter of different coding language, this is 100% an abusive relationship.

In the past two weeks Apple's own coding software, xCode, has suddenly crashed on me more times than I can count. Like one second it works and a split second later it just closes and I lose my progress.

When it came to video mixing Android had spoiled me. If I wanted to add a still image between videos it'd only take five lines. And iOS? It doesn't have that functionality at all. I have to take a still fucking image, save it as a video, and then use it. Absolutely wasteful.

I needed a place to save the created videos and there's a directory available called NSMovieDirectory or some shit. Sweet, that's a perfect place to save the videos to! Right?

Turns out although the NSMovieDirectory is in there, you can call it, it's not implemented for iOS devices, only Macs. A fucking variable you can call in iOS development doesn't even work for iOS devices. This is not a one off experience I've seen this happen with methods and variables multiple times.

Out of the blue xCode suddenly decided to stop auto predicting as I typed. This also included no longer showing any typos or other errors.

For whatever god forsaken reason if xCode detects several physical devices that it can run debug on, it will always pick a wireless device and NEVER the device you have literally plugged into your computer! The number of times I've started a debug build and waited for the app to start only to realize it's running on some unknown device elsewhere in the office is too damn high.

I felt my computer slowly dying installing all the needed files to run xCode. Forty. Fucking. Gigabytes. That's what's needed to merely use the damn thing. If you don't have physical devices and have to use simulators that gets even higher.

Designing UI layouts while dealing with different screen sizes and orientation changes is a whole circle of hell. I'd go into further detail why but that would make this post several pages long. Just know that it is far more convoluted and buggy than it has any right to.

TLDR: If you're using an iOS app and wonder why it's buggy, more than likely it's because the developers were being dragged into programming hell by Apple.

TLDR2: For the love of all that is holy and good in this world don't be like my workplace: use something to make iOS apps that isn't native iOS.

[coffeeworldsasaki]

I need to learn that taking breaks is good because I struggled with something for 2 hours yesterday and I solved it in 3 minutes and half today

[coffeeworldsasaki]

I've written some code and now I'm too afraid to test it because it took me 5 agonizing days to get to this conclusion ✌️

[coffeeworldsasaki]

I know I'm doing a loooot of work by cleaning up the code to get ready to add functionalities but it's still annoying I can't see any progress in the app 😔

[coffeeworldsasaki]

I swear figuring out testing an Android app is a bit like playing pillars of eternity 2 on console when you're walking in the city, you do one movement and then 4/5 minutes of wait. And I don't even have the cute elf to flirt with and a cool plot and world, just the pain