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January 29th, 2008

The most useless thing I’ve read a thousand times.

It's this:
uselesserror.png
OK, first complaint. My script does not have a Line 368. It only goes up to 211. I know what you're trying to say, it's that after parsing the DOM and code, something went wrong on my own internal imaginary Line 368 which you can't see. What is the point of an error message, if it isn't helpful? Seriously, is it better to see this, than to see nothing at all? Fuck you, Microsoft! Second complaint. The javascript engine tried to access an Object with a property or method. Something wasn't good. Is it conceivable that a developer might be insterested in:
  • what object?
  • which property or method?
Microsoft, Fuck you! Third complaint. "Char: 2". What the fuck good is that when the line it's on is imaginary? Huh? Second character of line square root of negative kajillion. Fuck you, Microsoft! Fourth complaint. "Code: 0" WTF? I've been coding Javascript for 10 years, and I don't know what that means. What the holy freaking hell is a "Code Zero" in Javascript? Microsoft, Fuck you! I've got an error in my Javascript... only in IE. Why only in IE? Because Firefox tells me what the errors are, and I fixed them. With error messages like this one, I'll be hunting through objects for the next 30 minutes, refactoring and commenting things out until the error seems to disappear in IE. Fuck you, Microsoft! Fuck you, Microsoft! Your browser sucks!

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2 Responses to “The most useless thing I’ve read a thousand times.”

  1. youfoundjake Says:
    February 22nd, 2008 at 2:45 pm

    lol, stay out of my head. Even though what you say is true, I still use IE, but yeah, these errors are useless. I end up counting lines in the source code from the rendered page to get upto line 400 when the prerendered code is 200 lines long. The one thing I have found, is that the error is generally on the line before the line given. Maybe that helps?

  2. Mike Says:
    March 8th, 2008 at 1:47 pm

    Once upon a time, I worked on a painful distributed batch job coordinator written entirely in ASP. It would give equally useless errors, although at least in its case the line numbers weren’t imaginary (but I was left to guess which of the 100 or so .ASP files it was referring to. I had a script to show me line x in all the files in the project, so I could look at each one and see if it could conceivably cause the error in question)

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