Re:Mathematicians are chronically lost and confused (2014)
by jondubois on Friday June 10, 2016 @10:45AM
(#11876680)
I guess with programming, you can never get 100% certainty when it comes to correctness of your code - Unless you perform formal analysis which is impractical for most use cases.
Re:Mathematicians are chronically lost and confused (2014)
by chipsy on Friday June 10, 2016 @04:01PM
(#11879550)
You might not succeed at 100%, but you can remove "classes of error" by adopting particular styles or techniques backed by formal analysis. That's one of the biggest appeals of compiler technology - it can encode an understanding of patterns proven to detect failure, and in so doing lower your resulting bug count.
Until you have to interact with a black box of someone else's code. You can only be certain that the data you sent that particular time works, not that all possibilities of valid data work.