What Medieval Medicine and Computer Engineering have in common

Re:What Medieval Medicine and Computer Engineering have in c... by ivank on Monday November 08, 2010 @07:24PM (#1884708)

One problem is just how successful 'medieval' computer programming is. A decent programmer can write software that works nearly all of the time. Very few programmers have any incentive to write provably-correct software.

The other problem is that I have to build software on top of buggy libraries. Even if I prove that my bit of code is correct, I might not gain much.

I sometimes hope we get to this provably-correct world, I just don't see it happening any time soon.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Medieval Medicine and Computer Engineering have in c... by sliverstorm on Monday November 08, 2010 @09:35PM (#1885065)

> A decent programmer can write software that works nearly all of the time

Perhaps this explains some of my confusion and frustration with the assertion that quality specs & designs can eliminate the need for debugging. I am still a juvenile programmer, and thus even though I have a good spec & design, my code doesn't always do what I meant it to do when I wrote it.

[ Parent | on HN ]