On Monday, November 27, 2017 at 9:08:42 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 1:55 PM, Michael Torrie wrote: > > On 11/26/2017 07:11 AM, bartc wrote: > >>> You may argue that testing doesn't matter for his small game, written > >>> for his own education and amusement. The fact is that software in > >>> general is of abysmal quality across the boards, and promoting a habit > >>> of unit testing is good, even for trivial, home-grown stuff. > >> > >> I thought people were being hard on the OP. > > > > I wasn't being hard on the OP. My observation is about the state of > > *all* software. My software especially, your software, Microsoft's > > software. It all is of rather poor quality compared to the rigors of > > other industries like civil engineering, manufacturing, etc. > > Not all software is poor quality compared to all examples of those > industries. You'll find the equivalent of software bugs in a lot of > hardware situations; the difference with software is that we have 100% > perfect reproduction in the end-user products, so we call it a design > flaw instead of a production artifact. (How often do you buy a box of > something and find that a couple of them just break?) Even in > large-scale civil engineering projects, there are plenty of > stupidities. The house I'm living in has a place where the tiled floor > doesn't quite align with the wall that it meets, and I can't figure > out why; somewhere, two things that ought to have been parallel just > aren't. Bridges have been known to crack, cars break down for no good > reason, your hamburger just doesn't taste right today. > > Aviators have pinned down the best solution to this, I think. A pilot > is not expected to be perfect; he is expected to follow checklists. A > preflight checklist. A departure checklist. A landing checklist. > Everything that needs to be done right is mentioned on the list, and > you just go through the list and make sure you've done everything.
And thats where the analogy breaks down. Presumably a 50 person short-flight and a 600-person transcontinental may have at least something in common in their pilot-checklists What common will you find in a multi-million line OS, a thousand line script and a student prime-numbers first-program? No I am not dissing on testing and TDD; just that universality¹ of computing devices is something that our civilization is nowhere near understanding, leave alone dealing with — two programs can be more far apart than a bullock cart and a jet. And yet they are both programs ¹ Ive seen CS PhDs ask a student why a student didnt incorporate some error-checking into his compiler which amounted to solving the halting problem. More mundanely I see students have a hard time seeing their phones and their laptops as 'the same' -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
