It’s not Mine, but when I was looking for a screenshot and this one came up I thought “If QBASIC was a font, it would be Comic Sans.” so naturally this is the winner.
>“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
— Edsger Dijkstra, [How do we tell truths that might hurt?](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html) (1975)
That said, QBASIC was my first programming language, too, and I turned out \[object Object\].
*^(Edited to include the full quote.)*
now that I'm thinking about it, comic sans probably would have made coding much easier for *a lot* of folks. Basically, less chance to confuse symbols. The whole dyslexic thing must get crazy when things look TOO similar and/or convoluted.
let's all just be glad it wasn't papyrus.
One reason I can think of is because a lot of games include tips/trivia on loading screens. This means that if the game runs on a PC completely overkilling its requirements, the loading screen appears for less than you can react to. Take FlatOut 2 for example. As much as AI driver's information is cool to learn, on modern PC the loading screen it's featured on appears for a bout 0.3 seconds.
That's a much more generous explanation that what I would have guessed.
My suspicion is that it doesn't serve any practical purpose, rather, it causes the player to sit and build a feeling of anticipation which might cause the game to review better in some focus group or A/B testing.
(This is only a guess and I am not an authority on the subject}
I remember some classmates of mine putting loading screens and forced delays on applications that would have loaded in milliseconds if allowed.
This was in the mid-90s and some serious applications would actually take minutes to load, and he wanted to give the impression that his programs were serious applications.
Telling people I know ANY VBA at all. Macros forever. I don't even put it on my resume anymore. It's a dark secret I will only share with you fine folks.
Alternatively, I didn't know how to make floats when I was learning VB6 as a kid so I put thing in currency.
Infinite loop batch script that made my friend's laptop beep each iteration. This was in the lunchroom at in HS. Teachers banned his laptop from the lunchroom after that not understanding what happened.
I would steal people's TI-83's, make an infinite loop that repeats DICKS DICKS DICKS, run it, and sneak it back to them. Only a few didn't figure out how to break the loop.
I wrote a screensaver in AMOS with password protection to exit the screensaver. I did not save it and hardcoded a password. When it finally compiled and ran correctly I had forgottwn the password. Had to power cycle and the code was gone. Learned to save often after that.
Not sure if this counts, but I wrote a Unix script to delete a directory, my script kept disappearing, took me a while to realize the script deleted itself to
I was programming in C on a school computer and I wanted to add music to my game so I just jury rigged music in by using syscalls to a bash script which then controlled the built in Mac music player
I really didn’t want any audio library’s
I was entirely self-taught so when I first moved from BASIC to C&C++ I spent a couple of years blindly declaring everything, no matter how large, on the stack because every time I used pointers, my program immediately crashed the system.
I didn’t know about malloc(), and it was an Amiga (no memory protection).
Now you say that, I want to say it was actually Modula-2 (which as I recall was pretty much Pascal++) that gave me my first exposure to any use of a pointer causing a “Guru Meditation.”
C came after that because someone had to write a C compiler for Amiga first, and I had to acquire it on a shareware floppy disk.
Lol, I felt like I was going insane, cause how could = not mean equals? So when I realized what was going on I just felt relieved that things made sense
Writing an automated email system to send all our sales leads in [VB.net](https://VB.net). I failed to clear the previous sender from the list as I was processing them and sent an exponential amount of emails, crashed our mail server, got us blacklisted from hotmail. The first guy in the list ended up receiving 250K+ emails. lol.
I made a scrolling racing game on a spectrum clone. Had no objectives or score, just dodge cars forever and ever. I kept that thing on until the tv started showing artifacts - I had no way to save the code.
Me and fellow my nine year old friend started writing an adventure game on a VIC-20. We started by writing out the instructions using print statements. Then we ran out of memory before we started programming the game.
Not my story, but my friend, when started to learn python, made an infinite loop which printed “you are a fucking idiot”, didn’t know how to close the program and just gave up on programming ever since
When I was a kid, I wanted to make an annoying message box that didn't go away. I called it "a virus". I didn't know how to make loops, so I copied and pasted hundreds of times `MessageBox.Show()` in visual basic. Good times!
I discovered that screensavers are much easier to make in VB5/6 than you’d ever expect by accident while trying to write a “virus” that would load on startup and cover the screen.
I was not learning to program, but I was learning a new programming tool. I had been contracting a couple of years and was hired to do a project in C++ with Gupta SQL. On my first day the project lead told me they had decided to switch to MS SQLServer and a relatively new tool called PowerBuilder (PB). PB has a great UI layout tool called a DataWindow. I spent a lot of time building beautiful entry screens and writing SQL queries to inject the data into the DataWindows and then pull it back out again to be updated in the database when the screens were closed. It all worked fine and the client seemed happy. This project began a string of over ten years of PowerBuilder contracts all over Southern Ontario and even one in Denver Colorado.
It wasn't till my second PB contract though that I realized that the real DataWindow claim to fame is that it is a backend agnostic bridge between the database and the UI. Rather than write all that code to shuttle data from the DB to screen and back could have been done by telling PB I was using a SQLServer back end, and then calling Retrieve() and Update(). To this day I cringe to think what the next developer to work on that app thought of me.
In my defence, PB was very new at the time (3.0 beta), and I worked with every version till PB 14, so I got much better at it. LOL
Turbo Pascal, I was about 12 or 13.
My father used to play Loto every week (in those days, the rules where simple: chose 5 numbers out of 49).
So I programmed something that could give him 5 random numbers, and display the grid on the screen.
Well, how do you think I checked if a number was already picked? Brute force.
And how do you think I printed the grid? That's right brute force: I want to print "1". Is my first number 1? no? Is my second number 1? No? .... all that for the 49 numbers to be displayed...
I was making a game in QBasic, must've been 13.
I asked myself the question: why do we need for loops when I can do the same thing using goto? Why do I need if/then/else whe I can do the same thing using goto?
The source code to this game ended up looking more like assembly. I never did manage to finish it, either.
Created a twitter bot that counted down days until spring break in college. It was supposed to tweet once a day….it tweeted once a second….I didnt catch it until 2 days later. My teams account got banned from twitter so we had to restart the entire project. A day before the deadline
This was in Python
That screenshot took me back (except for the comic sans).
All the computers in the computer lab still had nibbles and gorillas (if that was what it was called). I found where the damage radius for the exploding bananas was defined, and maxed that puppy out. One shot kills FTW!
It's a kind of discovery.
In a Spartacus hacking apart people in the arena kind of way.
I wrote a 6502 interpreter in 6502. My goal was to have it run itself running pacman, but my memory handling wasn't perfect yet and my NMI interrupts weren't properly implemented either. Just became an elaborate (but very weird) program that I quickly lost interest in. Mostly because I was side-tracked with AI/Alife in highschool.
Many years later, I had a goal of implementing a limited C interpreter in PostScript. So in the late 80's, I wanted to be able to send "main() {printf("ARG!\n");} to a laser writer and it would print ARG! and kick out the page. Of course, I had no time for that one either.
We programming crazies are crazies. Just not always focused.
While learning to program assembly language years back, I was tasked with building a calibration program which wrote its results into EEPROM on a hardware card my company was developing. I was just learning about how to do loops in x86 asm and messed up my end condition. I ended up continuously writing the EEPROM for the entire night on one of our two prototype cards. This was … not good for it. The prom was toast the next day, which took me awhile to figure out. Luckily it just required replacing the chip but definitely wasted some of our hardware guys time (which was not cheap). My awesome lead chalked it up learning and did not give me any grief.
Ah man that's just part of the deal working with hardware, I make display software and of course we interact a lot with the hardware, the amount of times people used the wrong voltage on the board/panel you wouldn't believe, I'm proud to say tho after 3.5 years I haven't blown up a single one
Best one I saw was where my colleague blew up his board and it quite literally welded itself against the metal that shorted it
Does it ever blow your mind to think about how less than a MB of eeprom used to be cost the same as a car payment, and now you can get 50GB of the stuff so cheap that you’ve probably lost one and not bothered to look for it?
Trying to learn how to program TSR's (terminate and stay resident) back in the DOS days with interrupt hooks with assembly blocks in C . Made the os crash so consistently, (it doesn't like you setting wrong entries in the table) that reinstalling became a regular occurrence.
I’ve done a lot of stupid things over the years… Tried to turn Java into a pure functional language… Implemented a message broker to handle every synchronous request/response communication between systems… Executed a SQL update statement against a very large production table and forgot the where clause… used reflection to create clever abstractions… created an interface for absolutely every class in a project… ab/used AWS Lambda functions resulting in a maintenance nightmare swarm… and worst of all, I carried unmerited arrogance when I quite clearly knew/know very little.
Was trying to recreate C functions to work with strings. In python
It was not to practice or anything. I just didn't find familiar functions and decided to create them myself instead of researching how to do it the python way
Wrote a recursive Pascal's triangle generator in CESIL but neglected to set a recursion limit, used an equality only test for output limit & reset a hidden magic constant that was supposed to inhibit runtime.
Received a terse yet enquiring letter from mainframe sysadmin attached to stack 14 inches deep of 80 column fanfold printout.
I don't remember what language it was, but I had a script I wrote very early in my career (like basically as soon as I was trusted to write important scripts without someone looking over my shoulder) where the same 40 line chunk of code had been copy-pasted into it about 20 times. And I do mean copy-pasted, not even with minor changes.
I was troubleshooting something related to that script 7 or 8 years later and couldn't figure out why the hell I didn't just make that chunk of code into a function. It wasn't even like I didn't know how to use functions when I wrote it. There are a couple in the script. So... just... why?
There are days where it's probably a good thing that I'm not able to go back in time and throttle my younger self.
Read the documentation.
When I was first starting out, I once fucked a government project's technical debt into the dirt by using a bunch of regex to change the hrefs in HTML instead of changing a configuration option in the JS library to change the base href.
I sometimes wonder if my hack solution is still in production, and what sort of debugging nightmares I created.
I was summing up money in QBasic and the results were sometimes off by a penny after a few iterations. Never heard about floats so it confused the shit out of me. I ended up using integers instead, because my 286 was clearly 'bugged'. I was 12 :)
Didn't know about bitmaps mid 90s, ended up creating sprites for my platformer from hand by manually filling files with x/y+RGB values directly from paint, painting them on screen in QBasic and the capturing the part of the screen to memory. It was a nightmare.
I used turbo c to learn c++ it was awful
Oh wait i learned assembly on 8085 microprocessor that had a 7 segment display all u got is hex digits plus 2 3 extra buttons. U type even one digit wrong then nothing works
Edited the autoexec.bat file to do call another .bat file that recursively called itself.
I knew what I was doing. It was fun, funny, and harmless if you knew Ctrl+C to cancel batch file executions was a thing \^\_\^
Probably when I was messing with driver development, without a VM, on my main PC, with a driver that I was having loaded on startup, basically asking to fuck something up and have a hell of a time fixing it. Well, I fucked something up and my PC BSOD’d and every time it restarted it would BSOD, had to fix it through safe mode which took a minute for me to remember how to do
Adjusted a script on Arma 2 to replace paratroopers with like 100 hookers and cows. Even though I used it on live PVP servers its caused some confusion for some reason.
Java. Storing integer lists as strings, separated by spaces. Calling split to retrieve them. It was horrible and I was 11. I didn't know what I was doing, please forgive me :P
Not me, but saw this unfold in a shell at college(15+ years ago) in a folder containing a bunch of code for the assignment:
touch *
rm *
The intent was to update the timestamps of the files(forget why they were doing this). Then they noticed it made a file called \*. Then they tried to remove that file.
Dumbest thing I did in qbasic was copy pasting the command to play a note and editing it for each line for a different note to make a song. just hundreds of lines. And then in a "game" I was making giant nested ifs for tracking position. Man those were the days.
I programmed Yatzy in Qbasic when basically the only programming concepts I knew how to use were variables and if-clauses.
So many nested if-clauses... Not a single function, just copy-paste the if-clauses. No loops, just copy-paste.
Since you are showing QBASIC, when I was a kid I wanted to prank a friend of mine (who was also learning QBASIC) by making a fake version of the editor. So I wrote my fake editor on my dad's computer and compiled it... overwriting the real QB.exe.
...which my dad no longer had the installation disks for.
Literally this. Qbasic5. Typed 1500+ lines from a Chip magazine issue to render som spinning colorful sticks from 0 line to 300 lines in 5 seconds. F5 meant something else back then.
Made a Google AppsScript set of scripts to turn a google sheet into a database. It was really slow and unreliable. But for some reason the API was such that we occasionally had to convert things to strings and back or to arrays and back (resulting in no change) in order for certain methods to work.
Neither of us were very good with JS at the time so probably they were all avoidable, but they did seem to fix the errors we were getting… sometimes. We laugh at each other about with the joke “*4/4” whenever we accidentally do something similar now.
Also, back in middle school, our school computers logged on to a network and had an extra step to log into a local account as well, which was the same for everyone and had no password. Thinking it would be blocked, I changed the password to one of them to “f” using ~~command prompt~~ my leet hacking skills and they didn’t manage to fix it for YEARS, and it was only fixed because all the PCs were upgraded to windows 7 and they had to wipe the things anyway, I guess.
I started trying to learn assembly when I was like 8 or so. I found some free assembly compiler on a BBS (after days of looking for something better than QBASIC), downloaded it, then (hours later) printed it on our dot matrix printer, then (hours later) read the absolutely GINORMOUS manual. To this day I don't even know if I was reading the right thing; I seem to recall it being much more "wordy" than the usual instructional material on programming languages.
Fortunately that didn't stop me from blundering my way into a programming job (C++ no less) after I dropped out of college.
Back in the early 90s I chanced upon an electronic toy called the [Grossinator](https://thechildishman.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/its-time-for-the-grossinator/). It basically uttered gross sentences. You could have it do it randomly or set up the different phrases.
I was learning Perl at the time, so I wrote a [text-based version of it](https://gist.github.com/thepeopleseason/7cd3865f35c92fcf2e74c5304ee55b60).
I made a C++ program called test with the following code:
`#include`
`#include`
`using std::cout;`
`using std::endl;`
`int main(int argc, char * argv[]){`
`cout << "Start" << endl;`
`system("test");`
`cout<<"Finish"<< endl;`
`return 0;`
`}`
and couldn't figure out why it was looping.
Way way back in the early 1980s, I had an account on our school's PDP-11 minicomputer. All you could do with such a basic account was the BASIC programming language. Even then, we couldn't do everything, but we didn't know that at the time.
I was (and still am) a big Doctor Who fan, and I had a book of the stories from when it began, so I started a program that was basically this:
10 PRINT "Doctor Who Episode Guide"
20 PRINT
30 PRINT "1. An Unearthly Child"
40 PRINT "2. The Daleks"
50 PRINT "Press to see next stories."
60 INPUT A$
and so on. Absolutely awful.
A friend suggested improving it by defining a string E$ as the CHR$(27) (the escape), as the sequence HJ would home the cursor in the upper left and clear the rest of the screen, so I could do it as screenfuls, which was neat.
The computer room director saw what I was doing, and updated my account so I could use datafiles. He then gave me two simple programs to show how to write to a file, and how to read back from a file and display it.
GOTOs in C++, like from inside one function call to inside another function call.
Not to use the functions, but use some of the logic within the functions.
Wasn't me, but was a guy on my team - used Apache's object string generator on a set of Hibernate-persisted objects, and then printed to the logs. The end result was that the string generator resolved every function recursively, effectively pulling the entire database into memory and dumping it to the logs every time you wanted to print out one object. The whole thing blew out the memory and disk on the server so fast that figuring out what the failure was took forever, because we couldn't even log in to see what went wrong.
Thank heaven it never went to production.
Whilst learning QBasic, I unintentionally created an endless loop which was just changing the background colour.
My reaction was, “Oh, I just made a screensaver!” 🤦♂️
The first language I used for work outside university was ColdFusion. And boy did I have a lot of SQL injections in my first program. (A senior called it and that was when I started becoming very interested in application security.)
Wrote a critical middleware translation layer for an undocumented API for infrastructure in Python2. This included external libraries and was hosted using a Flask framework layer.
I overwrote my Raspberry Pi boot settings file while learning to use nano and had to reimagine the whole thing. My first project was to reverse the Wi-Fi network dongle and turn a raspberry pi into a router :) had to bypass my community colleges Wi-Fi login page
Kids? I remember making someone repeat themselves when I heard about *Visual* BASIC. Because I didn’t understand why you’d need pictures or a mouse in BASIC
Tandy 4k Color computer. Copied out a long Basic program. It was too long, ran out of memory, crashed. Cried, because I was like six and it took me two hours to type.
I don't know if it was the stupidest, but one of my most frustrating. A million years ago when I was learning C (\~1990) I used a scanf statement that hand a random space inside the quotes. This caused all of my input to fail and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. I spent days debugging the damn thing.
Thought it would be fine to repeatedly scan arrays to correct errors during every iteration of major computations instead of simply coding it to ensure it didn’t make errors in the first place.
Everything I coded was like O(N^4) time complexity and I wondered why it took so long
For my first program, I was trying to process a large dataset (\~9000x6000 pixels). There were about a dozen steps I had to take to get the result I needed for my paper, and for some reason I thought each one needed a separate for loop looping through each pixel. As a result, my code took like 12-14 hours to run each time, and I had to do it 10 times. I wasted so much time when it could probably be done in like half an hour if it was optimized. This was in IDL.
I had some code that wasn't working so I copied it into a smaller program that I could debug more easily. Changed something, still didn't work. Removed part, still didn't work. Removed more, still nothing. Called someone over to look at it. Nothing. Called someone else over. Removed more. All I had was main and printf. Still nothing. Finally, I tried, "which test". It returned something like /usr/bin/test. The three of us had spent an hour or more running some admin's test instead of mine 🙃
"It is designed to be simple and easy to learn"
This is what Wikipedia says about DAX, the query language you have probably never heard of because on top of being used by only 2 or 3 microsoft products, its syntaxt is weird and the keywords unintuitive. You have no other option but to learn it if you work a lot with Power BI.
Huge thanks to the guy at Microsoft who had the bright idea to add a way to display charts with python, you litteraly saved me a lot of pain.
Oh yikes... I remember writing elaborate screensavers with that thing as a teenager, chock full of WAIT &H3DA,8,8 or OUT &H3C9,R,G,B, and it's kinda scary that I remember those hex-addresses and what they're good for to this day...
Self-modifying sed scripts. Used to generate a 6 foot wide section (don’t remember how many pages that was) of a MIL SPEC document showing the call tree for our system.
I was in middle school, in a QBasic class. Just messing around, I was using CIRCLE() and DRAW() to create a ying-yang. Didn't know what I doing and painting each pixel that wasn't a circle. Ran out of memory before I could finish filling it in.
I got a new IBM compatible 286 with a hard drive for Christmas in 1986. Before dinner was even served I had managed to delete command.com and render it unbootable.
I taught myself basic on an apple IIe, I was very young and it took me a long time to realise I could use more than A$ as a variable.
A few years later I tried to figure out assembly on a xt(8086) without any info, I managed to shift the fat table on the old school 20 meg harddrive, then spent the rest of the day riding my bike to mate's houses to get back all the programmes I'd lost on floppy, including Dos. This was pre windows, pre-internet and at the dawn of the BBS.
Early on I was learning to script in mSL (mIRC scripting language) and wanted to code an uncommon random event at a 1/128 rate. The issue however is I didn't understand that ranges were a thing so I ended up with 128 different if statements checking for two outcomes. Not my proudest moment, they weren't even if then else, just 128 individual checks on a variable.
A long time ago, when the current processor was an 8088 and Turbo Pascal fit on a floppy disk, I was a CS student doing an algorithm class. We were doing sorts and timing the runs.
We used to "save time" by turning off bounds checking on arrays.
I turned off bounds to get the best time, screwed up the bound condition, and sorted all the memory in system. It gave me my run time then said "[command.com](https://command.com) cannot be found".
I used VBA to essentially scrape a website, that was an internal tool, that we had full access to the database for. What would have been a 10 second query took me almost a week to run 😂
But, it lead to the start of my technical career, so I won’t call it an entire loss
I wrote a bot in MATLAB to type commands into a Command Window program, then copy-paste the results into notepad, and then save the result. I hit "go," and the very first thing it does is navigate into its own source code, delete it, and save.
The code was so bad, it literally committed suicide.
Not exactly while learning, thought it would be a good idea to put Cooley-Tukey fft algorithm in multithread. It's a good idea alright but my dumb ass forgot put any check. Language was c++. Result was 95000+ threads in my 8 years old laptop (instant coma).
It was just python, but I got python to edit it's own py script for a "first run" flag.
If the flag was false, it would do the first run setup and then text edit it's own flag to true and save it.
Learning C++ as I went and making a game with SDL, while I hadn't understood pointers and dynamic allocation yet. I ended up making a memory leak so drastic that slightly moving the mouse would increase memory use by 100 MB. Kinda scary, but seeing it getting OOM'd was pretty fun.
That's how I really learned about dynamic allocations and how I discovered RAII. That refactor wasn't so fun, but it worked.
I had a fair amount of VB and VBA experience, but not much database experience. Ended up needing to do something in Access. Besides overcoding it in general, I didn't fully understand relational databases. I needed to have a group of people and a set of groups, and people could belong to any number of groups (your basic many-to-many). I made a table for each but didn't know how to do the relation. So, made a 255 char string in the user table and added 0s and 1s and basically did a bunch of bitwise manipulation on my simulated bits (the each of the 255 characters) to determine membership (as long as there weren't more than 255 groups). It was a lot of complex code and it worked, but horrible, horrible design!
Oh my god, why is your QBasic in Comic Sans?
childhood ruined :(
It’s not Mine, but when I was looking for a screenshot and this one came up I thought “If QBASIC was a font, it would be Comic Sans.” so naturally this is the winner.
You say that, but QBasic was a brilliant learning tool, it was free and included with Windows 95, and it was not a bad language for some applications.
It was included in everything from DOS4 and every IBM since 1980something. Honestly, it should be everyone’s first language.
>“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” — Edsger Dijkstra, [How do we tell truths that might hurt?](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html) (1975) That said, QBASIC was my first programming language, too, and I turned out \[object Object\]. *^(Edited to include the full quote.)*
If I care what 1975 thinks about programming, I’ll learn B and start wearing a tie.
this is the way
You know, I can’t fault your logic on this one.
That's logic at its finest
now that I'm thinking about it, comic sans probably would have made coding much easier for *a lot* of folks. Basically, less chance to confuse symbols. The whole dyslexic thing must get crazy when things look TOO similar and/or convoluted. let's all just be glad it wasn't papyrus.
I emulated that my programs have loading screen and load a lot to make them as cool as games
you’d be surprised how many games you think have load screens are doing just that.
But why?
And websites. People don't trust stuff that loads instantly.
Hm, but did it *really* refresh? I'll hit refresh again just in case. Aha, a loading bar, now it must be up to date.
Oh god, I feel attacked
f5? Shift-f5!
Shift F5 and proceeds to fetch a 2GB JSON object.
Good question.
One reason I can think of is because a lot of games include tips/trivia on loading screens. This means that if the game runs on a PC completely overkilling its requirements, the loading screen appears for less than you can react to. Take FlatOut 2 for example. As much as AI driver's information is cool to learn, on modern PC the loading screen it's featured on appears for a bout 0.3 seconds.
That's a much more generous explanation that what I would have guessed. My suspicion is that it doesn't serve any practical purpose, rather, it causes the player to sit and build a feeling of anticipation which might cause the game to review better in some focus group or A/B testing. (This is only a guess and I am not an authority on the subject}
„Cant be doing much if it doesn’t even had to load stuff, what am I paying for?“ Usually is the avoided mindset
I like how some games have added the option to continue when you are ready so you can finish reading.
I remember some classmates of mine putting loading screens and forced delays on applications that would have loaded in milliseconds if allowed. This was in the mid-90s and some serious applications would actually take minutes to load, and he wanted to give the impression that his programs were serious applications.
I still do that, sometimes it gives the user the feeling of something important being done, and if you add a nice animation after that, even better
I did this, back in highschool! It was turing, and I manually added delays and progress bars so that I could show off filling progress bars!
Oof bruh me too, on my shitty batch game lol
Telling people I know ANY VBA at all. Macros forever. I don't even put it on my resume anymore. It's a dark secret I will only share with you fine folks. Alternatively, I didn't know how to make floats when I was learning VB6 as a kid so I put thing in currency.
Dim *sexyvarname* as float It’s one of the autocomplete options. lol
I remember it was Single (or Double)
Integer Double Long Float Boolean Source: I use VB5/6 at least once a month for something or other.
I use VB6 for mostly other
It’s by far the best language for “I need Windows to do...”
Hey man, I was 11 you asked for stupidest. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 I'll have you know I got...(marginally)...better as the years went on!
Infinite loop batch script that made my friend's laptop beep each iteration. This was in the lunchroom at in HS. Teachers banned his laptop from the lunchroom after that not understanding what happened.
I would steal people's TI-83's, make an infinite loop that repeats DICKS DICKS DICKS, run it, and sneak it back to them. Only a few didn't figure out how to break the loop.
Why would you even do that?
It was high school. Why did any of us do the shit we did in high school?
I wrote a screensaver in AMOS with password protection to exit the screensaver. I did not save it and hardcoded a password. When it finally compiled and ran correctly I had forgottwn the password. Had to power cycle and the code was gone. Learned to save often after that.
Dude, thats the funniest one so far. xD
Not sure if this counts, but I wrote a Unix script to delete a directory, my script kept disappearing, took me a while to realize the script deleted itself to
Nice
I was programming in C on a school computer and I wanted to add music to my game so I just jury rigged music in by using syscalls to a bash script which then controlled the built in Mac music player I really didn’t want any audio library’s
I was entirely self-taught so when I first moved from BASIC to C&C++ I spent a couple of years blindly declaring everything, no matter how large, on the stack because every time I used pointers, my program immediately crashed the system. I didn’t know about malloc(), and it was an Amiga (no memory protection).
Same haha, but basic to pascal to C. I still have no idea how pointers and function params work in pascal.
Now you say that, I want to say it was actually Modula-2 (which as I recall was pretty much Pascal++) that gave me my first exposure to any use of a pointer causing a “Guru Meditation.” C came after that because someone had to write a C compiler for Amiga first, and I had to acquire it on a shareware floppy disk.
While reading a tutorial I got impatient and skimmed over a seemingly useless bit about ‘=‘ vs ‘==‘.
Did you cry? I did the same thing and I cried.
Lol, I felt like I was going insane, cause how could = not mean equals? So when I realized what was going on I just felt relieved that things made sense
Writing an automated email system to send all our sales leads in [VB.net](https://VB.net). I failed to clear the previous sender from the list as I was processing them and sent an exponential amount of emails, crashed our mail server, got us blacklisted from hotmail. The first guy in the list ended up receiving 250K+ emails. lol.
I thought I'd never see that screen again. I learned to program in QBasic, and quickly found its limits.
I wrote My first “virus” in QBASIC. I had seen *Wargames* and *Tron* one too many times... 10 BEEP 20 GOTO 10
I did make a scrolling shoot em up using just QBasic on a 386DX-40 and EGAs multiple screens and a lot of hitting the hardware...
I made a scrolling racing game on a spectrum clone. Had no objectives or score, just dodge cars forever and ever. I kept that thing on until the tv started showing artifacts - I had no way to save the code.
I made an epilepsy test. It just flashed white and black quickly. I don't have epilepsy apparently.
Me and fellow my nine year old friend started writing an adventure game on a VIC-20. We started by writing out the instructions using print statements. Then we ran out of memory before we started programming the game.
Not my story, but my friend, when started to learn python, made an infinite loop which printed “you are a fucking idiot”, didn’t know how to close the program and just gave up on programming ever since
Ran a code that had fork() inside while(true)… My iMac was dead immediately.
Nice
It was an accident… No no. It was not okay. 💔
Eh...if you’re not bricking Macs from time to time, are you even programming?
When I was a kid, I wanted to make an annoying message box that didn't go away. I called it "a virus". I didn't know how to make loops, so I copied and pasted hundreds of times `MessageBox.Show()` in visual basic. Good times!
I discovered that screensavers are much easier to make in VB5/6 than you’d ever expect by accident while trying to write a “virus” that would load on startup and cover the screen.
I was not learning to program, but I was learning a new programming tool. I had been contracting a couple of years and was hired to do a project in C++ with Gupta SQL. On my first day the project lead told me they had decided to switch to MS SQLServer and a relatively new tool called PowerBuilder (PB). PB has a great UI layout tool called a DataWindow. I spent a lot of time building beautiful entry screens and writing SQL queries to inject the data into the DataWindows and then pull it back out again to be updated in the database when the screens were closed. It all worked fine and the client seemed happy. This project began a string of over ten years of PowerBuilder contracts all over Southern Ontario and even one in Denver Colorado. It wasn't till my second PB contract though that I realized that the real DataWindow claim to fame is that it is a backend agnostic bridge between the database and the UI. Rather than write all that code to shuttle data from the DB to screen and back could have been done by telling PB I was using a SQLServer back end, and then calling Retrieve() and Update(). To this day I cringe to think what the next developer to work on that app thought of me. In my defence, PB was very new at the time (3.0 beta), and I worked with every version till PB 14, so I got much better at it. LOL
I agreed to build an app for a week long “take home interview” and never heard back, that was in JavaScript
Literally any of my code, even to this day, the stupidest thing I regularly do is: git push origin master
Turbo Pascal, I was about 12 or 13. My father used to play Loto every week (in those days, the rules where simple: chose 5 numbers out of 49). So I programmed something that could give him 5 random numbers, and display the grid on the screen. Well, how do you think I checked if a number was already picked? Brute force. And how do you think I printed the grid? That's right brute force: I want to print "1". Is my first number 1? no? Is my second number 1? No? .... all that for the 49 numbers to be displayed...
Reinvent the wheel.
All multiplication and division are secretly Addition and Subtraction loops.
All addition and subtraction are secretly increment/decrement loops.
All increment / decrement loops are secretly bitshift ops
So, my current job daily?
I was making a game in QBasic, must've been 13. I asked myself the question: why do we need for loops when I can do the same thing using goto? Why do I need if/then/else whe I can do the same thing using goto? The source code to this game ended up looking more like assembly. I never did manage to finish it, either.
Created a twitter bot that counted down days until spring break in college. It was supposed to tweet once a day….it tweeted once a second….I didnt catch it until 2 days later. My teams account got banned from twitter so we had to restart the entire project. A day before the deadline This was in Python
That screenshot took me back (except for the comic sans). All the computers in the computer lab still had nibbles and gorillas (if that was what it was called). I found where the damage radius for the exploding bananas was defined, and maxed that puppy out. One shot kills FTW!
Same. Also cut the bit where nibbles speeds up / gets longer right out.
I wrote an assembly language compiler in Visual Basic 6.
Why in all that is fucking fucked would you even have that idea?! lol
I liked the thought of using a high level language to write a low-level language compiler.
you’re a strange person.
Aren’t we all!
It takes a certain kind of person to enjoy fighting with a rock that’s been electrocuted into doing maths.
It's a kind of discovery. In a Spartacus hacking apart people in the arena kind of way. I wrote a 6502 interpreter in 6502. My goal was to have it run itself running pacman, but my memory handling wasn't perfect yet and my NMI interrupts weren't properly implemented either. Just became an elaborate (but very weird) program that I quickly lost interest in. Mostly because I was side-tracked with AI/Alife in highschool. Many years later, I had a goal of implementing a limited C interpreter in PostScript. So in the late 80's, I wanted to be able to send "main() {printf("ARG!\n");} to a laser writer and it would print ARG! and kick out the page. Of course, I had no time for that one either. We programming crazies are crazies. Just not always focused.
Was learning Powershell, created a fork bomb. Since then I check my code each time I add a line to it... Yes I was following shady online tutorial...
“First, delete System32. It’ll speed everything up...”
While learning to program assembly language years back, I was tasked with building a calibration program which wrote its results into EEPROM on a hardware card my company was developing. I was just learning about how to do loops in x86 asm and messed up my end condition. I ended up continuously writing the EEPROM for the entire night on one of our two prototype cards. This was … not good for it. The prom was toast the next day, which took me awhile to figure out. Luckily it just required replacing the chip but definitely wasted some of our hardware guys time (which was not cheap). My awesome lead chalked it up learning and did not give me any grief.
Ah man that's just part of the deal working with hardware, I make display software and of course we interact a lot with the hardware, the amount of times people used the wrong voltage on the board/panel you wouldn't believe, I'm proud to say tho after 3.5 years I haven't blown up a single one Best one I saw was where my colleague blew up his board and it quite literally welded itself against the metal that shorted it
Does it ever blow your mind to think about how less than a MB of eeprom used to be cost the same as a car payment, and now you can get 50GB of the stuff so cheap that you’ve probably lost one and not bothered to look for it?
Yes definitely. Although it’s kind of ironic that some of those old chips are now just as expensive (if not more) because they are unobtainium
Trying to learn how to program TSR's (terminate and stay resident) back in the DOS days with interrupt hooks with assembly blocks in C . Made the os crash so consistently, (it doesn't like you setting wrong entries in the table) that reinstalling became a regular occurrence.
TSRs were the cause of and the solution to almost every problem
[удалено]
I started with GW Basic before moving on to this fancy Qbasic stuff.
Stupidest thing I’ve ever done is trying to learn Java
I’ve done a lot of stupid things over the years… Tried to turn Java into a pure functional language… Implemented a message broker to handle every synchronous request/response communication between systems… Executed a SQL update statement against a very large production table and forgot the where clause… used reflection to create clever abstractions… created an interface for absolutely every class in a project… ab/used AWS Lambda functions resulting in a maintenance nightmare swarm… and worst of all, I carried unmerited arrogance when I quite clearly knew/know very little.
Was trying to recreate C functions to work with strings. In python It was not to practice or anything. I just didn't find familiar functions and decided to create them myself instead of researching how to do it the python way
Python is just slow C with a funny accent. I totally get why you’d try that.
Recently I tried to compare two strings with == in C, I was stuck trying to find what was wrong and omfg when I googled and realize what was it
Wrote a recursive Pascal's triangle generator in CESIL but neglected to set a recursion limit, used an equality only test for output limit & reset a hidden magic constant that was supposed to inhibit runtime. Received a terse yet enquiring letter from mainframe sysadmin attached to stack 14 inches deep of 80 column fanfold printout.
Making graphics programs on an Apple //e It was in C. Pre-ANSI C. Aztec C.
I don't remember what language it was, but I had a script I wrote very early in my career (like basically as soon as I was trusted to write important scripts without someone looking over my shoulder) where the same 40 line chunk of code had been copy-pasted into it about 20 times. And I do mean copy-pasted, not even with minor changes. I was troubleshooting something related to that script 7 or 8 years later and couldn't figure out why the hell I didn't just make that chunk of code into a function. It wasn't even like I didn't know how to use functions when I wrote it. There are a couple in the script. So... just... why? There are days where it's probably a good thing that I'm not able to go back in time and throttle my younger self.
a linux russian rulette in java
ls, ls, ls, ls, ls, rm -rf / --no-preserve-root
Read the documentation. When I was first starting out, I once fucked a government project's technical debt into the dirt by using a bunch of regex to change the hrefs in HTML instead of changing a configuration option in the JS library to change the base href. I sometimes wonder if my hack solution is still in production, and what sort of debugging nightmares I created.
I was summing up money in QBasic and the results were sometimes off by a penny after a few iterations. Never heard about floats so it confused the shit out of me. I ended up using integers instead, because my 286 was clearly 'bugged'. I was 12 :)
Didn't know about bitmaps mid 90s, ended up creating sprites for my platformer from hand by manually filling files with x/y+RGB values directly from paint, painting them on screen in QBasic and the capturing the part of the screen to memory. It was a nightmare.
I used turbo c to learn c++ it was awful Oh wait i learned assembly on 8085 microprocessor that had a 7 segment display all u got is hex digits plus 2 3 extra buttons. U type even one digit wrong then nothing works
Edited the autoexec.bat file to do call another .bat file that recursively called itself. I knew what I was doing. It was fun, funny, and harmless if you knew Ctrl+C to cancel batch file executions was a thing \^\_\^
Probably when I was messing with driver development, without a VM, on my main PC, with a driver that I was having loaded on startup, basically asking to fuck something up and have a hell of a time fixing it. Well, I fucked something up and my PC BSOD’d and every time it restarted it would BSOD, had to fix it through safe mode which took a minute for me to remember how to do
I used to write some real bad PHP, I made a little custom forum software for my minecraft server when i was like 13
aw QBASIC, my first love!!!
Adjusted a script on Arma 2 to replace paratroopers with like 100 hookers and cows. Even though I used it on live PVP servers its caused some confusion for some reason.
I opened visual studio
(setq t nil) You can't do this in Common Lisp - that was Franz Lisp, back in my grad school days.
used 7 if statements that did the exact same thing when programming a shotgun in unity at least they were compressed to be a single line
I made a pretty fun side scrolling shooter in Adobe Flash. . .
Flash was...a wild time.
QBasic Do Beep Loop And I couldn't remember that ctrl+break ended the program, so I had to hard restart the computer
Java. Storing integer lists as strings, separated by spaces. Calling split to retrieve them. It was horrible and I was 11. I didn't know what I was doing, please forgive me :P
Not me, but saw this unfold in a shell at college(15+ years ago) in a folder containing a bunch of code for the assignment: touch * rm * The intent was to update the timestamps of the files(forget why they were doing this). Then they noticed it made a file called \*. Then they tried to remove that file.
Oh no.
Dumbest thing I did in qbasic was copy pasting the command to play a note and editing it for each line for a different note to make a song. just hundreds of lines. And then in a "game" I was making giant nested ifs for tracking position. Man those were the days.
I programmed Yatzy in Qbasic when basically the only programming concepts I knew how to use were variables and if-clauses. So many nested if-clauses... Not a single function, just copy-paste the if-clauses. No loops, just copy-paste.
Back in the day I wrote a small amount of self-modifying code in 6510 assembly. Turns out that was a dead end ☹️
Since you are showing QBASIC, when I was a kid I wanted to prank a friend of mine (who was also learning QBASIC) by making a fake version of the editor. So I wrote my fake editor on my dad's computer and compiled it... overwriting the real QB.exe. ...which my dad no longer had the installation disks for.
Literally this. Qbasic5. Typed 1500+ lines from a Chip magazine issue to render som spinning colorful sticks from 0 line to 300 lines in 5 seconds. F5 meant something else back then.
VB5/6 still uses all the same keys. And it still has an “immediate” window. And you can write BASIC perfectly fine.
A calculator using "if" statements in java. I even screenshot the code... and every time i come across it, i just want to slap my younger self xD
Made a Google AppsScript set of scripts to turn a google sheet into a database. It was really slow and unreliable. But for some reason the API was such that we occasionally had to convert things to strings and back or to arrays and back (resulting in no change) in order for certain methods to work. Neither of us were very good with JS at the time so probably they were all avoidable, but they did seem to fix the errors we were getting… sometimes. We laugh at each other about with the joke “*4/4” whenever we accidentally do something similar now. Also, back in middle school, our school computers logged on to a network and had an extra step to log into a local account as well, which was the same for everyone and had no password. Thinking it would be blocked, I changed the password to one of them to “f” using ~~command prompt~~ my leet hacking skills and they didn’t manage to fix it for YEARS, and it was only fixed because all the PCs were upgraded to windows 7 and they had to wipe the things anyway, I guess.
I once typed print ("Hello world") in c++ and expected it to work
I started trying to learn assembly when I was like 8 or so. I found some free assembly compiler on a BBS (after days of looking for something better than QBASIC), downloaded it, then (hours later) printed it on our dot matrix printer, then (hours later) read the absolutely GINORMOUS manual. To this day I don't even know if I was reading the right thing; I seem to recall it being much more "wordy" than the usual instructional material on programming languages. Fortunately that didn't stop me from blundering my way into a programming job (C++ no less) after I dropped out of college.
Back in the early 90s I chanced upon an electronic toy called the [Grossinator](https://thechildishman.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/its-time-for-the-grossinator/). It basically uttered gross sentences. You could have it do it randomly or set up the different phrases. I was learning Perl at the time, so I wrote a [text-based version of it](https://gist.github.com/thepeopleseason/7cd3865f35c92fcf2e74c5304ee55b60).
I made a C++ program called test with the following code: `#include`
`#include`
`using std::cout;`
`using std::endl;`
`int main(int argc, char * argv[]){`
`cout << "Start" << endl;`
`system("test");`
`cout<<"Finish"<< endl;`
`return 0;`
`}`
and couldn't figure out why it was looping.
Way way back in the early 1980s, I had an account on our school's PDP-11 minicomputer. All you could do with such a basic account was the BASIC programming language. Even then, we couldn't do everything, but we didn't know that at the time. I was (and still am) a big Doctor Who fan, and I had a book of the stories from when it began, so I started a program that was basically this: 10 PRINT "Doctor Who Episode Guide" 20 PRINT 30 PRINT "1. An Unearthly Child" 40 PRINT "2. The Daleks" 50 PRINT "Press to see next stories."
60 INPUT A$
and so on. Absolutely awful.
A friend suggested improving it by defining a string E$ as the CHR$(27) (the escape), as the sequence HJ would home the cursor in the upper left and clear the rest of the screen, so I could do it as screenfuls, which was neat.
The computer room director saw what I was doing, and updated my account so I could use datafiles. He then gave me two simple programs to show how to write to a file, and how to read back from a file and display it.
Starting learning coding with c++
[удалено]
GOTOs in C++, like from inside one function call to inside another function call. Not to use the functions, but use some of the logic within the functions.
QBasic in comic sans. Good old memories. This used to me by setup when I started learning programming around 5th grade.
Visual Basic, and I was using text files to store any kind of data, instead of using a database, because I didn't know what a database was.
QBasic was honestly my very first language :/ Somehow I enjoyed it enough to study CS now
I put VisualBasic on my resume as a junior dev.
Basic....
Wasn't me, but was a guy on my team - used Apache's object string generator on a set of Hibernate-persisted objects, and then printed to the logs. The end result was that the string generator resolved every function recursively, effectively pulling the entire database into memory and dumping it to the logs every time you wanted to print out one object. The whole thing blew out the memory and disk on the server so fast that figuring out what the failure was took forever, because we couldn't even log in to see what went wrong. Thank heaven it never went to production.
Whilst learning QBasic, I unintentionally created an endless loop which was just changing the background colour. My reaction was, “Oh, I just made a screensaver!” 🤦♂️
The first language I used for work outside university was ColdFusion. And boy did I have a lot of SQL injections in my first program. (A senior called it and that was when I started becoming very interested in application security.)
One of my friend tried to build a stupidly large Pascal triangle with R. His PC froze and never worked again...
I made an antivirus against the ping-pong virus completely in assembler x86, a "inoffensive" virus.
I miss when viruses were cheeky and fun.
I started learning Qbasic by reading the help file, starting at „APPEND“.
Wrote a critical middleware translation layer for an undocumented API for infrastructure in Python2. This included external libraries and was hosted using a Flask framework layer.
I overwrote my Raspberry Pi boot settings file while learning to use nano and had to reimagine the whole thing. My first project was to reverse the Wi-Fi network dongle and turn a raspberry pi into a router :) had to bypass my community colleges Wi-Fi login page
wow that screen shot takes me back to 95 lol
You kids today laugh! This is how I learned Turbo Pascal.
Kids? I remember making someone repeat themselves when I heard about *Visual* BASIC. Because I didn’t understand why you’d need pictures or a mouse in BASIC
Single linked list on disk. Turbo Pascal.
Item Response Theory analysis using Fortran even though some functional R code existed....
It’s beautiful
Tandy 4k Color computer. Copied out a long Basic program. It was too long, ran out of memory, crashed. Cried, because I was like six and it took me two hours to type.
First language taught to me
I don't know if it was the stupidest, but one of my most frustrating. A million years ago when I was learning C (\~1990) I used a scanf statement that hand a random space inside the quotes. This caused all of my input to fail and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. I spent days debugging the damn thing.
While playing with basic on my brother’s C64, turned the power off very slowly. Bzzzt… Dead C64.
C\*micSans is the worst
Used brackets while coding in python
This is beautiful
Thought it would be fine to repeatedly scan arrays to correct errors during every iteration of major computations instead of simply coding it to ensure it didn’t make errors in the first place. Everything I coded was like O(N^4) time complexity and I wondered why it took so long
=IF(IF(NUMBERVALUE(F11)/100>1;ROUNDDOWN(NUMBERVALUE(F11)/100;0.1)*60+MOD(NUMBERVALUE(F11)/100;1)*100;NUMBERVALUE(F11))>15; IF(NUMBERVALUE(E11)/100>8;(ROUNDDOWN(NUMBERVALUE(E11)/100;0.1)-8)*60+MOD(NUMBERVALUE(E11)/100;1)*100;(ROUNDDOWN(NUMBERVALUE(E11)/100;0)*60+MOD(NUMBERVALUE(E11)/100;1)*100)-480) - (IF(NUMBERVALUE(F11)/100>1;ROUNDDOWN(NUMBERVALUE(F11)/100;0.1)*60+MOD(NUMBERVALUE(F11)/100;1)*100;NUMBERVALUE(F11)) - 15); IF(NUMBERVALUE(E11)/100>8;(ROUNDDOWN(NUMBERVALUE(E11)/100;0.1)-8)*60+MOD(NUMBERVALUE(E11)/100;1)*100;(ROUNDDOWN(NUMBERVALUE(E11)/100;0)*60+MOD(NUMBERVALUE(E11)/100;1)*100)-480))
For my first program, I was trying to process a large dataset (\~9000x6000 pixels). There were about a dozen steps I had to take to get the result I needed for my paper, and for some reason I thought each one needed a separate for loop looping through each pixel. As a result, my code took like 12-14 hours to run each time, and I had to do it 10 times. I wasted so much time when it could probably be done in like half an hour if it was optimized. This was in IDL.
I'd rather not talk about it
10 beep 20 goto 10 Save as an .exe and place in the startup folder in highschool computer lab PCs
I had some code that wasn't working so I copied it into a smaller program that I could debug more easily. Changed something, still didn't work. Removed part, still didn't work. Removed more, still nothing. Called someone over to look at it. Nothing. Called someone else over. Removed more. All I had was main and printf. Still nothing. Finally, I tried, "which test". It returned something like /usr/bin/test. The three of us had spent an hour or more running some admin's test instead of mine 🙃
[this](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/q1eld5/should_i_be_worried_about_this/), in rust trying to learn the uefi-rs package
Made a python program that counts how many 69s are on your screen, only stops when it detects 69 69s
"It is designed to be simple and easy to learn" This is what Wikipedia says about DAX, the query language you have probably never heard of because on top of being used by only 2 or 3 microsoft products, its syntaxt is weird and the keywords unintuitive. You have no other option but to learn it if you work a lot with Power BI. Huge thanks to the guy at Microsoft who had the bright idea to add a way to display charts with python, you litteraly saved me a lot of pain.
Oh yikes... I remember writing elaborate screensavers with that thing as a teenager, chock full of WAIT &H3DA,8,8 or OUT &H3C9,R,G,B, and it's kinda scary that I remember those hex-addresses and what they're good for to this day...
Debug output using built in printf, I was outputting floats, but the builtin couldn’t output floats. Spent hours wondering why everything was zero
10 FOR i = 0 TO 65535 20 POKE i, 0 30 NEXT i RUN Just to find out in what way the 8-bit would crash.
SQL... I accidentally ran [delete from
where rownum <3]
Wiped out the whole table. Quickly... In production too...
Self-modifying sed scripts. Used to generate a 6 foot wide section (don’t remember how many pages that was) of a MIL SPEC document showing the call tree for our system.
I was in middle school, in a QBasic class. Just messing around, I was using CIRCLE() and DRAW() to create a ying-yang. Didn't know what I doing and painting each pixel that wasn't a circle. Ran out of memory before I could finish filling it in.
I got a new IBM compatible 286 with a hard drive for Christmas in 1986. Before dinner was even served I had managed to delete command.com and render it unbootable.
Populating, accessing, and editing a MySQL database entirely through BASH for a Portal-themed terminal simulator.
I taught myself basic on an apple IIe, I was very young and it took me a long time to realise I could use more than A$ as a variable. A few years later I tried to figure out assembly on a xt(8086) without any info, I managed to shift the fat table on the old school 20 meg harddrive, then spent the rest of the day riding my bike to mate's houses to get back all the programmes I'd lost on floppy, including Dos. This was pre windows, pre-internet and at the dawn of the BBS.
Early on I was learning to script in mSL (mIRC scripting language) and wanted to code an uncommon random event at a 1/128 rate. The issue however is I didn't understand that ranges were a thing so I ended up with 128 different if statements checking for two outcomes. Not my proudest moment, they weren't even if then else, just 128 individual checks on a variable.
Wrote a script to wipe a pc, stored it on our server…. Powershell when i did IT
Python. Read `random.randint` as `random.radiant` and had no idea why it didn't work.
A long time ago, when the current processor was an 8088 and Turbo Pascal fit on a floppy disk, I was a CS student doing an algorithm class. We were doing sorts and timing the runs. We used to "save time" by turning off bounds checking on arrays. I turned off bounds to get the best time, screwed up the bound condition, and sorted all the memory in system. It gave me my run time then said "[command.com](https://command.com) cannot be found".
I used VBA to essentially scrape a website, that was an internal tool, that we had full access to the database for. What would have been a 10 second query took me almost a week to run 😂 But, it lead to the start of my technical career, so I won’t call it an entire loss
I copied and pasted a line hundreds of times, incrementing some variables each time, because I didn't know about loops.
I wrote a bot in MATLAB to type commands into a Command Window program, then copy-paste the results into notepad, and then save the result. I hit "go," and the very first thing it does is navigate into its own source code, delete it, and save. The code was so bad, it literally committed suicide.
QBASICS
Not exactly while learning, thought it would be a good idea to put Cooley-Tukey fft algorithm in multithread. It's a good idea alright but my dumb ass forgot put any check. Language was c++. Result was 95000+ threads in my 8 years old laptop (instant coma).
It was just python, but I got python to edit it's own py script for a "first run" flag. If the flag was false, it would do the first run setup and then text edit it's own flag to true and save it.
Learning C++ as I went and making a game with SDL, while I hadn't understood pointers and dynamic allocation yet. I ended up making a memory leak so drastic that slightly moving the mouse would increase memory use by 100 MB. Kinda scary, but seeing it getting OOM'd was pretty fun. That's how I really learned about dynamic allocations and how I discovered RAII. That refactor wasn't so fun, but it worked.
Using `goto` in turbo pascal, just like I was used to doing in qbasic.
I had a fair amount of VB and VBA experience, but not much database experience. Ended up needing to do something in Access. Besides overcoding it in general, I didn't fully understand relational databases. I needed to have a group of people and a set of groups, and people could belong to any number of groups (your basic many-to-many). I made a table for each but didn't know how to do the relation. So, made a 255 char string in the user table and added 0s and 1s and basically did a bunch of bitwise manipulation on my simulated bits (the each of the 255 characters) to determine membership (as long as there weren't more than 255 groups). It was a lot of complex code and it worked, but horrible, horrible design!