Then you breathe a sigh of relief, merge it with a comment of "bug fix", write no documentation--especially about how it failed testing, and quit the gig during the inevitable helpdesk explosion; walking away from the fireball like the Michael Bay maniac you are.
That won't crash your kernel, and I was more curious about the OPs example. Task management is basically reading some files, and sending signals, it should be near impossible to crash the system.
My first programming related memory is of the QBasic interpreter.
I had written some code I was quite happy with, but not saved it yet. As part of a subroutine for sound output, I quickly wrote a loop from 20 to 20000 to output a test signal over 1 second each with that frequency via the PC speaker and hit execute.
Realizing my mistake, It being MS-DOS and thus single-threaded, I couldn't Ctrl+C out of it without killing QBasic altogether and losing my code. I couldn't turn town the PC speaker.
I ended up closing various doors between the PC and me and waiting it out.
What language were you using?
Python maybe? I don't know of any other interpreted language, that you may be calling system commands from, without saving to disk
I use C and C++ and my IDEs save to disk before compiling. Makes sense to not try compiling when there are potentially 2 versions (one on RAM or /tmp and one on Disk) and the build system might be running multiple commands, which the IDE may/may not know of, in my case.