The Daily WTF's Remy Porter presents another dispatch from Greta, who works with what she calls an 'Ancient Development Environment' — apparently an old C++ Builder-era IDE.

The IDE's job in this case is simple: report a build error. Why the error occurs, Greta has not figured out — the message explains neither what went wrong nor how to fix it, and it appears inconsistently, so re-running the build sometimes makes it vanish. The real WTF, however, is the presentation.

Greta's bullet points of despair: an arbitrary popup during builds under unknown conditions; no information about what, if anything, failed; the payload is non-user-legible XHTML, shown as raw markup rather than rendered; worse, the markup is displayed in a tree view with one row per source line; the markup is not even well-formed, for multiple reasons; the control comes from a legacy windowing toolkit without text anti-aliasing; and the first button, 'Get latest C++ Builder Direct headlines from the Internet', does nothing at all.

Porter notes he had nearly forgotten the era when the Internet was novel enough that every application shipped a 'click here to visit our website' button destined to break with the next URL restructuring. Greta concedes one redeeming feature: the second button, 'Information about C++ Builder Direct', unleashes such a potent dose of 90s nostalgia that she cannot stay mad.