Programmer Humor

32070 readers

437 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
No NSFW content.
Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml

cat_programmer@lemmy.ml

321

What a time to be alive (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 10 months ago by sebastiancarlos@lemmy.sdf.org to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Its not a joke. I worked for a big european bank network and the software there didn't know how to translate from EBCDIC to UTF8 because none of the devs writing the software knew enough of the other side (mainframe vs PC) to realise this was an issue.

Their solution was "if the file has a ? in it when we receive it, it's probably a £". Which of course completely breaks down the day you have any other untranslated character.

I spent fucking weeks explaining this issue and why this was abominable, but apparently this wasn't enough of an issue for people to fix it. Go figure...