On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 5:57 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Tue, 06 Dec 2011 16:30:16 -0800, John Ladasky wrote: > >> Oh, please don't say that. I'm no computer scientist, and Python has >> been scrutinized by so many professionals. I couldn't have possibly >> found a language bug. > > While your modesty is a welcome change from n00bs who imagine that > anything about Python that they misunderstood is a bug, don't sell > yourself short. You don't need to be a computer scientist to identify > bugs in software.
Likelihood of something being a bug generally depends heavily on "eyeball density". If a piece of code gets a lot of eyeballs, chances are its bugs have been found (not always but often). Generally, the code that makes up a heavily-used open source project can be expected to have quite a few eyeballs near it as a regular thing; but there's always the obscure bits that don't. Crypto modules have fallen foul of this on occasion, with bugs lurking there far more than might otherwise be expected, on account of such a small portion of coders ever touching cryptography. Of course, it's always less embarrassing to say "I think I'm using this wrong" and have someone say "You found a language bug" than to come in guns blazing with "ur lnguage is teh buggy" (sorry, I don't speak Lame very fluently) only to learn that you spoiled the incantation in some way. The number of people who assume that their first-time code is perfect and the language is hopeless is somewhat astonishing. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
