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Long Distance DATE$ing
todd [decorative spacer] July 12, 2006 [decorative spacer] 2:43 PM

The Daily WTF is one the favorite websites among the software engineers where I work. I thought about posting it a while ago, but I figured no one would get the humor. "What's funny about referential integrity," you might ask, and it would be a good question.

Today's wtf, however, is wonderful. Basically, a programmer does something stupid (uses a system resource to save a value) which works fine for a while (as all great progamming blunders do), and then breaks catastropically when the code is shipped to Europe. Affected users have their system dates set to confusing values and after the 13th of the month printing only works on every second attempt.

What I like best about this is that it gives non-programmers a sense for how completely absurd behavior arises. I think programmers conceive of software and bugs differently from normal people. This is sort of a window into our mindset, in fairly understandable language.

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