I need to understand why things don’t work. Not that it matters to anyone else, once the “fix” is applied. Break, fix. Break, fix. But why did the thing happen in the first place? Without that crucial piece of knowledge, it’s bound to break again.
Nine Levels of Nested Parentheses
Early in my career, I worked on a system that relied on Boolean expressions to select computer report pages to be printed and distributed to recipients. I was good at it. One time, I managed to craft an inordinately complex statement to capture all the varied pages for a single recipient. It was probably ten lines long. It was, I thought, a thing of beauty. Impeccable logic, all the quotation marks and parentheses were properly opened and closed, and yet…it wouldn’t run. Bombed every time. I had systems engineers and programmer/analysts check and double-check, and all agreed it was perfection. But still…no joy. The thing wouldn’t run. I glared at the mainframe. If I could craft it with my very limited computer science background, that damned machine – big as a small bus – ought to be able to understand it and run it. It just stood there, impassive. The experts all gave me the same completely unsatisfying, but ultimately effective, advice: “Break it into smaller statements.”
None of them could explain to me why. Not a single one of them knew, and they all admitted as much. If I weren’t on a deadline, I’d have beat my head bloody against the side of the mainframe in frustration. Instead, I fumed internally for a decade.
One day, back when I still smoked, I was outside in the break area telling a colleague about this past and useless frustration. If you smoke, you know the real value of standing in the outside break area. You run into colleagues from all parts of the company. You meet people you never would have met, otherwise. You learn more quickly what’s really happening throughout the organization.
An older man approached us, chuckling. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help overhearing you. I think I can tell you exactly what the problem was.”
“Really? Please! Tell me.”
“I used to work for IBM. That operating system only supported nine levels of nested parentheses. I’ll bet you went over the limit.”
“Of course I did. Thank you!”
That’s all I’d needed to hear for ten years. That’s it. Just one logical, accurate explanation. I wouldn’t have protested simplifying the selection statements had anyone told me the parameters in the first place. “I don’t know” is a great answer, an honest answer. But I knew there had to be a better one and surely somebody had to know what it was.
Annoying Line Breaks
My post, Increase Diversity, had a phantom line break. It’s not the first time this has happened on this blog. In the past, I’ve been able to futz around with the posts until the phantom line break was laid to rest for good, but not this time. I asked three WordPress experts and my favorite Support person at my web hosting company, and none of them knew. One finally did figure out a solution but they couldn’t explain to my satisfaction exactly why the solution was necessary since I had only made one teeny-tiny change to my CSS in the past month or more, and it should not have been what it was: a Divi cache issue. There is a very secret, very “advanced,” very hidden place to go to clear it – and that’s all it took. Still makes absolutely no sense to me how any minor change to the CSS, cached or not, could cause phantom line breaks in the middle of a line.
Start the clock on another decade of frustration!
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