[sometimes]

> I for one would speculate, not to sound harsh, that if you haven't made silly errors like this then you haven't been around the block enough times.

on the other hand, those of us who have been around the block enough times have almost certainly encountered co-workers who were bright, talented, cute, whatever - but at the end of the day were just ... sloppy ... lazy ... careless ... in their approach. It's a personality thing - they had nice childhoods, they never learned to by hyper-vigilant and paranoid, and as a consequence... they write buggy code that can't be trusted.

[Vivtek]

"...never learned to by hyper-vigilant..."

My eyebrow just raised so far my forehead cramped.

[cperciva]

Muphry's law.

[sometimes]

I'm contemptuous of his coding practice, not his writing or grammar. His writing is pleasant to read... but so what? where are the multiple layers of defense standing between a simple syntactical or semantic error and a full scale business-impacting technical fuck up. that is what I meant by being vigilant and paranoid.

[untog]

I'd be offended if it wasn't for the fact that your original accusation appears to be that I had had a happy childhood. I'll take that one on the chin.

As for the rest... well, I don't understand where you're going with it. Pop psychology aside, are you really suggesting that you write utterly seamless code every single time? You've never done a build and then realised that you made an error somewhere along the way, gone back and fixed it? You act as if my mistake had the potential to ruin a business. Of course it didn't- I picked up on it before the code had even been pushed to the remote repository.

You can live in a world where everyone does everything perfectly, every time (and pay the price when you inevitably don't) or you can set up systems with unit testing, user testing, and- yes- developer testing that results in bugs being dealt with in a timely manner before a single end-user sees anything.

But hey, each to their own. Whatever works for you. If you get it right first time, every time, then you are a better programmer than I, and I congratulate you on it.

[da5e]

>>You act as if my mistake had the potential to ruin a business. Of course it didn't- I picked up on it before the code had even been pushed to the remote repository.

Not to beat on you, but didn't you discover the error after users started using it in a big news day?