Warning: this is just one of those ranting, whinging, blog posts you all developers like.
Yesterday I have been struggling almost half an hour with a python script. A very simple one: connect to a system, download an XML. This XML is a paginated list containing the number of the current page, the next one, and the last. The script should have simply got to the next page, read the “next” number, downloaded such page, and terminate when current == last.
Easy, right?
Except I spent half an hour trying to understand why the script was going into an infinite loop. I am an experienced programmer, but not a massively confident one: when things don’t work, I check my code. You can call it coding modesty if you prefer.
It turns out the problem was in the XML: whatever the page, it always contains “this = 1” and “next = 2”. This is supposed to be a production system, at its version 3, for which the institution I work for pays a huge amount of money.
This is quite a big bug on a basic function of what is supposed to be a production system. Which prompts me the obvious question: have they ever tested it?