Today I am going to take you inside the insane world of web programming. Don’t worry. It won’t get too technical. Come on over here and take a peek behind the scenes….
If you were to peek over my shoulder, you’d see a whole bunch of stuff with dollar signs, equal signs, parentheses, brackets, colons, semi-colons. It would give you a headache. Trust me. It gives me a headache after a while. But what’s really fun is if you put a bracket in the wrong place or leave out a semi-colon or something that anyone can mess up on if they’re typing fast – ya know. A typo.
But here’s where it gets fun – leave one thing out or have one tiny little thing in the wrong place and your program won’t work. It will do nothing except sit there and spit out errors, if you’re lucky and you even get that.
It’s sort of like your dog staring at you because something is wrong. You know something is wrong. The dog knows something is wrong. But he can’t tell you what and you have to figure it out all on your own. Which, in this case, means looking through hundreds of lines of code to see where you messed up.
Now doesn’t that sound like fun?
Then there are the things that are broken but really aren’t. I had that today. It happens when you just make a stupid mistake but don’t realize it until you’ve spent hours trying to track down what went wrong.
Today I had a link disappear. It should have been there but it was gone. I looked at so many files, re-wrote code. Nothing. Suddenly it dawned on me – the reason the link disappeared is because there wasn’t anything in the stupid link. It was blank.I was skipping over a field in my testing and it needed that particular field to show the link.
Okay, that sounds completely techy and geeky, doesn’t it? Well let’s go back to the dog analogy. I have no clue what the dog wants and why he is stalking me. I think he’s in pain or he has to go out. I completely don’t notice the obvious, the thing that is staring me in the face if only I’d walk into the kitchen: his water bowl is empty.
Clearly I have been looking at code for way too many hours today. I think it’s quitting time.
I know so little about programming that I don’t even know how to frame a question intelligently, but are there combinations of code symbols that don’t make any sense? For example, could a programmer looking at some code for the first time realize that *&^% makes no sense whereas %^&* does? If so, is there any equivalent of a spellcheck or grammar check for programmers that could occasionally pick up a stupid error.
Tough question. In many cases, yeah, you could look at code and see an error like that but there are so many exceptions to the rules & different ways of using the same things and so many programming languages that a spell check is virtually impossible.