On 17/12/2013 15:24, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Tue, 17 Dec 2013 09:54:41 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:
In article <mailman.4286.1387291924.18130.python-l...@python.org>,
Neil Cerutti <ne...@norwich.edu> wrote:
On 2013-12-17, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
I would really like to see good quality statistics about bugs per
program written in different languages. I expect that, for all we
like to make fun of COBOL, it probably has few bugs per
unit-of-useful-work-done than the equivalent written in C.
Well, there was that little Y2K thing...
Oh come on, how were people in the 1990s supposed to predict that they
would be followed by the year 2000???
That's a good point, but that wasn't a language issue, it was a program
design issue. Back in the 70s and 80s, when saving two digits per date
field seemed to be a sensible thing to do, people simply didn't imagine
that their programs would still be used in the year 1999[1]. That's not
the same sort of bug as (say) C buffer overflows, or SQL code injection
attacks. It's not like the COBOL language defined dates as having only
two digits.
[1] What gets me is that even in the year 1999, there were still
programmers writing code that assumed two-digit years. I have it on good
authority from somebody working as an external consultant for a bank in
1999 that he spent most of 1998 and 1999 fixing *brand new code* written
by the bank's own staff. You'd think that having lived through that
experience would have shaken his belief that private enterprise does
everything better, and the bigger the corporation the better they do it,
but apparently not. Go figure.
I was in charge of the team at work that had to make all code Y2K
compliant. I discovered the one bug that to my knowledge slipped
through the net. Four years later back at the same place on contract I
fixed the fix!!!
--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.
Mark Lawrence
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