Hello dear fellow programmers,
Did it ever happen to you after watching a movie to start wondering what would be a Perfect Crime?
Every once in a while we may hear about some angry programmer who left a company or was fired, and did or wanted to leave something broken or some time bomb behind him. Though nowadays with broad use of versioning, not only would it be easy to fix such a misfeature, but it would also be trivial to figure out who committed it.
Or would it?
We all have at least once faced a tough bug, occurring for tricky reasons or as a consequence of an unlikely situation.
As an example I remember once encountering a bug in some Lua code (which is dynamically typed), where some function returned a string coming from some service. If I recall correct, somewhere else in the code, the string would be used as a key for a dictionary. And when for some reason the service failed, in the function that used the string as a key it evaluated it as an integer and things broke up.
When I hit such a bug, I can not but think that if it were done on purpose, it would be pretty clever.
So here is the "It's not a bug, it a feature" question: if you were to purposely design a bug in a versioned project, what would you come up with? The goal is obviously to design a tricky one, and difficult to relate to its author (or at least it should look like a true mistake).
As a side note, this is a sensible question, and I understand you may have concerns regarding it. But from a theoretical point of view, I think it is both interesting and challenging. Oh, and I have no problem with my company. ;-)
On a similar topic: What is the hardest bug to find?
