From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: kevin.bowling@kev009.com (Kevin Bowling) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 04:43:45 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Clueless programmers In-Reply-To: <005301d3a5a0$226410d0$672c3270$@ronnatalie.com> References: <005301d3a5a0$226410d0$672c3270$@ronnatalie.com> Message-ID: I've never seen anything this bad, and it gave me a hearty laugh out loud. I guess in my years people mostly self select toward safer languages if they are human fuzzers. On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 7:28 AM, Ron Natalie wrote: > >> already 20 years ago I met a guy (masters degree, university) who never freed dynamically allocated memory. He told me he is 'instantiating a object', but had no idea what an heap is, and what dynamically allocated memory means. > > Years ago, I had an new programmer who I just couldn't teach. He never understood the difference between an array and pointer, and apparently couldn't be bothered to learn. > After string him along for three months, I was on my way into his office to fire him when I found out he had quit, but not before he checked a bunch of drek into our source code control system. > I thought I backed all his commits out at the time. > > Years later I was running "purify" on our product looking for memory leaks. I found this small utility function that predated the source code control system leaking. This, I thought was odd, as it had been there FOREVER and was well tested. I brought up the source code system and checked it anyhow and found the afore mentioned programmer had checked in one change: he deleted the "free" call in it. > > I KNOW what happened. He did something else to corrupt the malloc heap in his code and often this causes a core dump in a subsequent malloc/free call. Apparently this was the place it struck him, so he just deleted the free call there. >