I just had a surprisingly annoying version of a very mundane bug. I was working in Javascript and I had some code that read some parameters from the URL and then did a bunch of math. I had translated the math directly from a different codebase so I was absolutely sure it should be right; yet I was getting the wrong answer. I console.logged the inputs and intermediate values and was totally flummoxed because all the inputs looked clearly right, until at some point a totally nonsense value was produced from one equation.
Of course, the inputs and intermediate values were strings that I forgot to parse into Javascript numbers, so everything looked perfect until finally it plugged them into my equation, which silently did string operations instead of numeric operations, producing an apparently absurd result. But it took a good 20 minutes of me plus my coworker staring at these 20 lines of code and the log outputs until I figured it out.
I just had a surprisingly annoying version of a very mundane bug. I was working in Javascript and I had some code that read some parameters from the URL and then did a bunch of math. I had translated the math directly from a different codebase so I was absolutely sure it should be right; yet I was getting the wrong answer. I
console.logged the inputs and intermediate values and was totally flummoxed because all the inputs looked clearly right, until at some point a totally nonsense value was produced from one equation.Of course, the inputs and intermediate values were strings that I forgot to parse into Javascript numbers, so everything looked perfect until finally it plugged them into my equation, which silently did string operations instead of numeric operations, producing an apparently absurd result. But it took a good 20 minutes of me plus my coworker staring at these 20 lines of code and the log outputs until I figured it out.