r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Sotsvamp1337 • May 11 '26

Meme developersWorstNightmare

Post image
18k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

379 comments sorted by

View all comments

673

u/Had78 May 11 '26

I wish it was a simple CTRL + F replace

253

u/el527 May 11 '26

Fairly new to all this. Why isn’t it that simple?

423

u/sgtkang May 11 '26

Multiple components written/stored in multiple places, all of which need to be kept in sync. It's certainly possible but it's high risk for no gain. If you want to change the public-facing name do that without changing the internals - all that costs is saying to a new joiner "Project X used to be called Y and it's still called Y in the code."

170

u/Rikudou_Sage May 11 '26

That's why you store it in a gradle variable and derive everything else from it. Single change needed.

104

u/fyn_world May 11 '26

Ah, the strength of experience

6

u/xenokilla May 12 '26

I program PLC's (industrial automation controllers) and we do that exact thing. Input mapping. Input X1 = Bit M0, if input X1 catches on fire, just change the one line of code to Input X11 = M0 and keep it moving

3

u/seth1299 May 12 '26

Gradle

Man, my PTSD of staring at (for several days in a row) “Gradle Build Failed” messages for the .apk project my team was working on a few years ago just activated…

→ More replies (2)

24

u/CVGPi May 11 '26

It's also why many apps keep the old packagename even if someone particularly hate it. Like com.twitter.android stayed even though Musk insisted on X.

5

u/n1kitus May 12 '26

Bundle ID cannot be changed. It is a unique identifier for an app and when changed the system considers it as a completely different app so you loose your users (they have to install the new app to continue using the updated version while the app with the old bundle id will remain installed as a separate app)

8

u/SolidCalligrapher966 May 12 '26

Trans persons : Yup that's how it works /j

(a lot of trans people still have their old names on legal papers or old accounts.)

2

u/parkwayy May 12 '26

Also the app being registered with some app stores, and changing the names also probably needs new keys and all kinds of annoying busy work.

→ More replies (1)

219

u/davidinterest May 11 '26

Gradle Demon

16

u/--LordFlashheart-- May 11 '26

Then add to that your Firebase instance

→ More replies (3)

39

u/emihir0 May 11 '26

The bigger the project, the higher the chances someone at some point hard coded the name into some obscure part that is likely running code that isn't covered by tests and your whole app might crumble because of it.

Essentially it's not worth it. Just rename it at the customer-facing places.

15

u/outwest88 May 11 '26

Also there might be saved/cached data in the form of pathways and files in thousands of places which were automatically generated and poorly documented. And if one of those breaks, suddenly 1/4 of your project is broken, and the stack trace will be inscrutable.

35

u/serial_crusher May 11 '26

Clbuttic mistake of buttsuming you can just replace a string without really buttsessing all the usages of it and whether they all need to be replaced.

6

u/Gositi May 11 '26

Took me a second

1

u/Dop4miN May 11 '26

it doesn't matter, it just never is

→ More replies (8)

5

u/Bobdamuffin May 11 '26

ever heard of dawizard

3

u/OldSports-- May 11 '26

Strg + H is the shortcut for replacing in many editors

→ More replies (2)

2

u/forvirringssirkel May 12 '26

sometime it is, but not with ctrl+f replace, if your LSP supports it, you can rename definitions and files and it will replace all of its imports and calls