Norbert, Knight of Endless Nights

Paean to programming practitioners.

Oh Calliope, help our hero hack his way here,
assist your artless author account for all!

Norbert negotiates nefarious nulls,
pointers dangling left and right from thoughtlessly thrown threads.
He follows each to its source, statements spun as spaghetti,
hydras holed up in the heap.
He forces frees to find some space.

He comes across a curios constructor
contained in a class without comments,
Looking at the listing and laughing aloud, long lines loose and lame.
A clean cup of coffee and chew a chunk of chocolate
while chasing this code to completion.

Night now, the normal nerds not around,
network produce packets promptly, proceed with perverted program,
place pauses to debug and deposit decent data.

Lovely Ada will lie alone tonight;
boss boldly pronounces “it’s broken I need it fixed by tomorrow”.

Core dump! Segmentation violation –
traceback tells of mangled methods, most monstrous mayhem in memory.
Start it up again, stopping to step by instruction, east test and branch,
read the registers and scan the stack.

Harken to the header a horrible confusion of conditional compilation,
considering every conceivable code generator and operating system,
so many obsolete legacies of long ago.

Beowulf cluster bombs and comes apart,
At least it’s Linux and loads from disk, not punched paper tape.

Suspend execution slip down in subterranean subroutines,
seeking a solution. Satisfied that source is sound,
some other software must be messed up.
Dig up documentation, from four versions before
and hopeless to hold help.

Timing troubles are tricky to trace, stopping sends a separate sequence.
Put prints in pivotal places to follow flow
and examine expression evaluations.
Show on console so can comprehend as compute,
log in file to look at later.

Demented data model demands more diligence,
merging too many tables, jarring joins jam redundant rows,
requiring rapid relocation of reasonable results.
Wanton window whisk wildly, keep on clicking
before break in buggy callback,
buffer blown, bytes blasted to bad data.

Allocate more memory, build and run again,
working the widgets, watching as it silently spins, never stopping.
Attach debugger and seems to stay in same place, locked in endless loop.
Kill process and patch program.

Need a new module, code it quick, modify makefile, making sure to tab.
Fix typos and try again. Debug new function and find it fixes.

Remarkably, it now runs, results are reasonable, ready revision for relase.
Heading home at dawn I tell my boss "its fixed, maybe I’ll be in tomorrow".