| From what I think is the article's punch line, in context of software bugs: "We put them there, and we can decide to not put them there" I don't think this is strictly true. Sure from a strict computational theory or mathematical proof perspective we can 'produce no bugs' but from a meat-space reality standpoint programming ecosystems do not work this way. The game changes when you need to ship some bits from one place to another, or demand contract on the representation of truths over time, or guarantee no interruption of service on vague notions of "indefinitely". How perfect can any one individual execute the exacting theory of the stack: ASM(s), C-derivatives, OS Kernels, TCP/UDP, DNS, TLS, pythons/javascripts/golangs, HTTP, SQL-derivatives, libraries, frameworks, cluster orchestrators, oh my the list just keeps getting bigger each and every year... So we write bugs, because we have to. Imperfect knowledge is part of our professional practice. Much like the sciences our bugs persist not because they were "wrong" but because we build on top of them as new facts emerge. From the articles principle advice: "If you want a single piece of advice to reduce your bug count, it’s this: Re-read your code frequently. After writing a few lines of code (3 to 6 lines, a short block within a function), re-read them. That habit will save you more time than any other simple change you can make." We do this. Programmers can tend to be narcissistic, we love reading our code we just wrote: oh the beauty, oh the wonderful shortcut, oh the performance, all while enjoying the quickly fading context in which we wrote it. If our knowledge was wrong in constructing the code, assumptions are still wrong while reviewing it. But in practice we run code reviews, automated compilation/linters/tests/etc to ensure that the quality of our code is not left to the individual programmer who is quick to forget that it was not for them in the first place. Bugs have a harder time surviving multiple perspectives (generally). Now back to searching for this years bash incantations :) |