Code is Engineering; Types are Science

Re:Code is Engineering; Types are Science by sweeneyrod on Monday April 06, 2020 @08:17AM (#22793035)

> If by this you mean that you are wondering how often bugs in Haskell programs make it to production, the answer seems to be "at about the same rate as bugs in C or Java, as far as we can tell".

That seems surprising. What are the bugs that Haskell has but C and Java don't that replace all the null pointer exceptions?

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Re:Code is Engineering; Types are Science by danielscrubs on Monday April 06, 2020 @09:05AM (#22793339)

I had a horrible problem with space leaks when running weeks in production, didn't help that I used a pure Haskell db at the time. :)

Here are some more info http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/05/space-leak-zoo/

It's been almost a decade since though. Maybe the compiler catches more nowadays.

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Re:Code is Engineering; Types are Science by tsimionescu on Monday April 06, 2020 @12:43PM (#22795231)

I have no idea, but here is some speculation:

- perhaps Haskell programs end up being more feature-ful within a given bug budget

- perhaps Haskell induces more logic bugs, because it is more alien to the regular way of thinking

- perhaps the vast majority of NPEs are actually logic bugs, so that preventing them through the type system does not actually significantly reduce the number of bugs

- perhaps the study had some flaws in how it was counting issues

- perhaps some or all of the above are true, in various proportions

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