Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough”

Re:Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough” by joe_the_user on Monday July 18, 2016 @04:24PM (#12117846)

Actually, I'd say writing perfect code in the mathematical domain is extremely hard - floating point types are a minefield and infinite-precision arithmetic is a minefield also if you consider the possibilities for running-times exploding. For example, code for the mean of a list of numbers is a hard problem when looked at in its full generality [1] - and that's using forgiving definition of "perfect" - alway correct and terminating, running at a reasonable speed.

[1] http://hypothesis.works/articles/calculating-the-mean/

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Re:Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough” by skybrian on Monday July 18, 2016 @05:01PM (#12118038)

Great link! But also, the mean is itself an imperfect summary of some distributions. Any single-number summary will be misleading in some cases.

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Re:Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough” by bradleyjg on Monday July 18, 2016 @05:13PM (#12118095)

Anscombe's quartet is a great illustration of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet

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Re:Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough” by fbonetti on Monday July 18, 2016 @07:42PM (#12118629)

That's really cool! Btw, I'd love to drop that line into casual conversation some time. "Anscombe's quartet" has a nice flow to it.

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Re:Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough” by Retra on Monday July 18, 2016 @08:24PM (#12118768)

Floating point isn't really the baseline for great mathematical structure, it's just a pervasive hardware standard.

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