5 baffling error messages that make you go huh?

As programmer, I have written hundreds of thousands of lines of code that during development have produced an error. When you first start out, this regular occurrence can be a very tough ride as you learn your trade.

But over time you learn to write better quality, less error prone code, and when you do hit a problem, the debugging skills you have picked up along your journey help you iron out the issues.

But every now and then you get presented with an error message that just makes you say, "huh?!?".

Here are 5 errors that I have encountered over my time as a programmer that initially had me stumped.

Stack Overflow in line 0

Whilst Internet Explorer and Microsoft software in general has a reputation for giving users cryptic, unhelpful, and overly technical error messages, if you write the wrong JavaScript into Internet Explorer 7/8, you may be presented with:

Stack Overflow in line 0

Not the most useful error, which can be triggered by a number of difficult to debug programming issues. Internet Explorer is basically saying the code has entered some sort of infinite loop, and has used all the memory allocated to it.

Detached Head

If you use Git as a version control system, it can take a while to understand all the concepts it presents such as cloning, branching and pushing. But use it for a while and during a commit operation you may be presented with:

You are in a 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental changes, and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this state without impacting any other branches by performing another checkout.

"What hell is a detached head?" is the first question that comes to mind. If you hit this error then somewhere along the line you have checked out a specific commit rather than tracking a branch, and so when you come to commit your changes, Git cannot move the head pointer along because it has no pointer to move.

This means you are detached from the head commit. It's a slightly laborious procedure of creating a branch, committing, switching, and merging to get back on track, but next time you will know what has gone wrong.

Paamayim Nekudotayim

If you have done some PHP programming you may have stumbled across this baffling error message:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected (T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM)

The term Paamayim Nekudotayim is actual Hebrew for double colon. In PHP, if you access a class method statically, you will use the scope resolution operator like so:

className::methodName();

The error occurs when you use the operator in an unexpected place, usually when there is a preceding error.

Why they decided to call it that instead of just double colon or scope resolution operator I don't know, I guess it is just another one of those loveable quirks of one of the most popular languages powering the web.

WSOD

Another PHP whoopsie, the acronym WSOD stands for White Screen Of Death. This is the worst kind of error you can get, because there is no indication of what the problem is at all, no cryptic error message, hexadecimal error code, not even a pixel on screen to indicate what the problem is, nada.

In lieu of any clues to get you started, often the easiest way to track the source of the problem down is to place an exit('hello'); command near the beginning of the script, and slowly move it forward in the script, reloading as you go, until you get a WSOD again, enabling you to narrow down the offending bit of code.

Keyboard not found

From programming software to debugging hardware, any person who is technical will inevitably have been asked to fix a hardware related issue with someone's computer at some point.

I dealt with some strange and unexpected errors in my career, but this one is certainly one of the most contradictory:

Keyboard not found: press F1 to resume

I was presented with this error one day when a client's computer wouldn't boot, something wrong with the AT port if I remember rightly, causing the keyboard not to be recognised.

How the programmers of that BIOS thought that you can press F1 when the keyboard is not recognised I don't know . . .

Let me know in the comments what weird and wonderful error messages have you encountered. And if you liked this post, please upvote!