News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code (2000; Still relev... by pmjordan on Friday November 05, 2010 @08:36AM (#1872886)
I think we can all agree that bugs are bad, but as Patrick mentioned there are different types of bugs, and some have a lower priority than new features. When I'm working with C or C++ I'm practically paranoid about bugs. [1] Memory corruption frequently has catastrophic consequences, where crashes are actually almost the best-case scenario. Bugs cause all sorts of knock-on effects in unrelated parts of the code. Most web frameworks run in a VM that avoids this kind of situation by design; moreover, state rarely lives in the app itself but is maintained in a separate database. Yep, it's still possible to accidentally DROP TABLE or DELETE/UPDATE the wrong stuff, but it's nowhere near as easy to do as a buffer overflow. I guess the modern day equivalent of memory corruption are security issues. Yet I (anecdotally) seem to encounter far fewer severe errors doing web dev.

[1] to preeempt ad-hominem claims of lack of experience or skill with C/C++: they were my primary languages for around 8 years, so at least I've seen my fair share of code

There are no comments on this comment yet.