8.10b - first impression and questions

[Derek Broughton]

Knapp wrote:

> There is a difference between perfect and bug free, I guess. Y2K bug
> existed because the first programmers never imagined than their
> software would still be being used in the year 2000. That is not a bug
> but a piece of software that is being used passed it's expiration
> date. 

That may be true of some software, but in fact great masses of software were
being written with no consideration at all of an expiry.  I was working for
a large bank at the time, and we still had tens of thousands of lines of
30+ year-old code, and nobody considered it past-its-prime - though we did
laugh at some of the things that had been done to compress the data (the
normal reason why there was no century in dates).

>> Like the lander software for Mars missions :-)
> 
> Except that was not a programming bug but a data entry bug because the
> USA is so stupid that they can't teach their scientists metric. (I am
> from the USA btw and resent that I was not properly taught the
> international standard ether in any useful way.)

Of course that's _why_ but it's still a bug.  I always learned that the data
was part of the program.
> 
> Yes, even in zero tolerance environments mistakes do happen. It is all
> a matter of how hard you want to look for the bugs. If you pay 10
> people to look over every line and a 10 more to test every line, you
> should end up with a perfect program that cost you millions to
> produce.

No, you'll end up with an almost-perfect program :-)
> 
> As for perfect software, I think the Linux kernel does a very good job
> at this. When was the last time you had a kernel crash on a Linux
> certified computer? Maybe not, "Perfect" but darn good.
 
Precisely
-- 
derek