To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head

Re:To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head by jimbokun on Tuesday July 15, 2025 @04:25PM (#44575457)

> It's much harder to prove stuff this way when you call foo(), bar() and baz() across unit boundaries, when they modify global state and are written by different developers.

I think this reinforces the article's point.

Code like this is much more likely to contain bugs and be harder to maintain without introducing more bugs, than programs written from the outset with this goal of "provability".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head by monocasa on Tuesday July 15, 2025 @06:00PM (#44576275)

And in fact, when you look at formally proven code, 80% of the shtick is reducing complexity of mutation to something tractable. That's valuable whether or not you then actually go through the process of formally proving it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head by hinkley on Tuesday July 15, 2025 @04:50PM (#44575678)

I just finished cave diving in a code base that's had a very old ticket to clean up the mess.

I went in with 3 tickets in mind to fix. I found half a dozen more while I was down there, and created 2 myself. I don't know if I got off easy or I was distracted and missed things.

The other project I'm working on is not dissimilar. Hey did you guys know you have a massive memory leak?

[ Parent | on HN ]