It turns out that after programming for 39 years, I've come to the conclusion that programming tools that contain foot guns are not fun.
@liw what an odd conclusion
@bagder Some of us learn slowly.
This realization was triggered a "workflow tool" for a programming language where running a program builds it before running it, but doesn't actually write the built binary to a file. Building the program does that.
Foot gun: if one has built the binary earlier and has a binary lying around, running the program with the workflow tool doesn't update the binary. Result: head-scratching when running the binary directly gives different results.