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>>Documents are cheaper to create and easier to change than bridges. Code is just another kind of document. That really depends on the type of code you are wri
by syshum 9y ago
>>Documents are cheaper to create and easier to change than bridges. Code is just another kind of document.
That really depends on the type of code you are writting.
Writing code going into a space craft, or Nuclear Power Plant, or Encryption code that can be relied on by people to protect their actual life, or code going into a medical device or.... you get the picture
Yes if your writing code going into the next Pokemon time waste game sure you can be fast and lose, but to not presume all code is the same.
In this instance, code is going into devices that historically do not get updated properly, I think that warrants taking a more "bridge building" approach and less "Code is just a document" approach
- closeparen 9y agoI think for that argument to work, you'd have to show that the word processing activity actually yields fewer errors in the resulting software. I guess what I'm saying here is that I've found writing prose beforehand to have low to zero ROI in terms of resulting software quality. I totally believe that writing math and actually proving things about your ideas would. The more important code is, the more I want to see it subjected to a realistic and comprehensive test suite, careful peer review, etc. Although you're right, I ultimately work on backend systems that can cause some downtime at worst, not industrial process control or crypto libraries. I also have the luxury of doing continuous delivery, incremental rollouts, feature flags, staging environments with shadow traffic, etc. so there are a lot of safeguards standing between a mistake and widespread impact.