Donn Cave <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I've wondered if programmers might differ a lot in how much they > dread errors, or how they react to different kinds of errors. > For example, do you feel a pang of remorse when your program > dies with a traceback - I mean, what a horrible way to die?
I'm reminded of the time I found out that a program I had worked on had crashed due to a coding bug. It was the control software for an ATM switch. I had moved on from that job a year or so earlier, but I found out about the crash because it took out vast swaths of data communications for the whole US northeast corridor for 2+ days (almost like the extended power outage of 2003) and it was on the front page of the New York Times. The first thing I thought of was that a certain subroutine I had rewritten was the culprit. I got on the phone with a guy I had worked with to ask what the situation was, and I was very relieved to find out that the error was in a part of the code that I hadn't been anywhere near. That program was a mess of spaghetti C code but even more carefully written code keeps crashing the same way. It was one of the incidents that now has me interested in the quest for type-safe languages with serious optimizing compilers, that will allow us to finally trash every line of C code currently in existence ;-). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
