Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

One of the “fun” things about programming is working out (and around) other people's bugs and quirks. It really blows me away how often sample code that ships with various tools has bugs (generally just typos) in it. Does this stuff not even get tested? And what kind of a madman globally declares and then uses non-standard values for constants like TRUE, FALSE, NULL, and so on? And what kind of lunatic uses functions with identical names to standard Windows API calls, meaning that if you want to make calls to both, you have to write a custom include file?

Don't even get me started on the amount of bizarre and unexpected output that you get from OSS libraries and tools that have been worked on by dozens of people… and it really puts the icing on the cake when the documentation says “you know, this isn't really very accurate, so if you want to know how to call this function, just read the source code instead.” Yeah, thanks, I think I'll just write it myself.

PS. I really wish I was at Scar Wars right now!