hydroptic

Ah, anti-cheat problems? Feels like those are nearly the only ones that won't play nice with Proton nowadays

Or, you know, don't use Windows

I think having null is great in some cases where you need to represent missing value.

Option types or sum types would probably be a much less terrible choice for this, although I guess some sort of nullable keyword counts as a sum type

That's $6400 per hour

Great article, thanks for the link! It makes good points that I hadn't really considered; I've probably just been cranky about it because I've preferred heterogenous translations

Oh yeah how did I forget the billion dollar mistake, definitely one of the worst misfeatures of Java

At least shapewise it's like close-ish; the one that really gets my goat is how the fuck does т turn into m.

Java was such a fractal of stupid design choices in its early years, and a lot of it is still there. OOP except when it's not (int vs Integer, [] arrays but also List et al), no unsigned number types, initially no way to do closures or pass methods around so everything had to be wrapped in super verbose bullshit, initially absolutely dogshit multiparadigm support and very noun-oriented, initally no generics either meaning everything's an Object, when it did get generics they had to do type erasure for backwards compatibility, etc etc etc

She was an asshole who wanted me to redo work for free because she believed her son over someone who actually knew what they were doing, and after tens of minutes of wrangling I just went "fuck it" and obliged her request to sanitize the peripherals. The sum wasn't all that big to begin with, so it's not like she was on the hook for hundreds of euros – probably got a 50€ bill instead of a 20€ one. Not knowing any better obviously wasn't the problem here, but if that's your takeaway then I really don't know what to tell you.

So yes, I did it.
No, I'm not sorry.
Yes, I'd do it again.

I think my dumbest customer story isn't programming-related but still related to computers. I worked in a small computer repair shop about 3000 years ago, and one day a customer comes in with their family computer that's "not working." It turned out to be full of viruses and malware, and when we started working on it it turned out this was due to somebody visiting shady porn sites and clicking on download buttons left and right. I explain the situation to her and then recommend steps on how to avoid this happening in the future, so how to browse safely, antivirus software etc. She feelt a bit embarrassed and says that it's her son, and that she'll give him a talking-to.

A few weeks later the same customer comes back with the family computer and this time she's visibly annoyed, and curiously she's brought along the keyboard, mouse and monitor. The computer's got viruses again, and it's my fault. Why? Because she'd had a talk with her son who had then sworn up and down that he'll mend his filthy ways. When new viruses cropped up, his explanation was that obviously they're in the keyboard, mouse and monitor too, and since they hadn't been in the shop they were still infected and we were just too incompetent to have known this. Naturally she believed her son over my word, and started demanding that we remove the viruses from all the peripherals. I tried for a very long time to explain that it's just not possible (this was a time when PS/2 connectors were still pretty common and that's what they had so it wasn't even theoretically possible), but she wouldn't budge because her son was a computer whiz (he wasn't) and a Good Boy™ and would never lie, so clearly I was either incompetent or lying.

Finally I just relented and said "OK you got me, it's possible your viruses came from the peripherals but I just didn't want to mention it because removing them is so time-consuming and difficult". I took all their hardware in and had it unfucked in pretty short order, and I looked at the browser history to make sure that it really was a reinfection via the web, which it was (I remember Pamela Anderson featuring in a lot of the searches, which we techs giggled at.)

I kept their hardware at the shop for a couple of weeks; it's a tricky and demanding job to remove viruses from mouses, keyboards and monitors, remember? When writing the bill I charged her double the time I actually put in – she didn't want to pay at all because she felt it was our mistake but at that point my boss, who was a formidable lady, practically put her boot up the customer's ass and made her cough up the money.

She left in a huff never to be seen again, thank the gods.

LINE GO UP! This is good for economy! You want line to go up don't you? If you don't, you let the communists win