3 ms·

With all due respect, I think your argument is a little silly. Typos are the one mistake that programmers never stop making no matter how experienced they are,

With all due respect, I think your argument is a little silly. Typos are the one mistake that programmers never stop making no matter how experienced they are, in my experience. For the same reason, you can pick up a book by an experienced, established writer and find typos in it as well. It's useful for your tools to help you catch basic mistakes like that instead of just saying you should work with programmers who are competent enough to never write typos.

kamaal 8y ago
I don't think we are talking about that kind of typos. But there is a often a big dip in quality of people, who routinely struggle to write a half decent working program without making these kind of mistakes. Sure every once in a while its possible for any one to drop in a spelling mistake, but those are rare situations in code. Mostly because code is often not a dead piece of documentation, which is read and auto corrected in the human brain. Code works on a computer with well defined interfaces and protocols. Think of it this way, would you hire a programmer who often makes typos, to write shell scripts that have 'rm -rf'? If you wouldn't, how often do you trust these people to execute DROP DATABASE <typo_database_name_which_happens_to_be_real>? There is a big difference between programmers who can put in typos in a sentence in a code comment, and the kind of ones we are talking about.
- hellofunk 8y ago
  I've deployed tens of thousands of lines of Clojure for a company over several years, and I still find that I occasionally destructure a map with the wrong keyword and I end up with nil accidentally. It's frustrating as much now as it has ever been. Because the app just crashes instead of a simple compiler check that most languages would offer to capture simple stuff like this.

3 ms·

With all due respect, I think your argument is a little silly. Typos are the one mistake that programmers never stop making no matter how experienced they are,

by nosefrog 8y ago

kamaal 8y ago
I don't think we are talking about that kind of typos. But there is a often a big dip in quality of people, who routinely struggle to write a half decent working program without making these kind of mistakes. Sure every once in a while its possible for any one to drop in a spelling mistake, but those are rare situations in code. Mostly because code is often not a dead piece of documentation, which is read and auto corrected in the human brain. Code works on a computer with well defined interfaces and protocols. Think of it this way, would you hire a programmer who often makes typos, to write shell scripts that have 'rm -rf'? If you wouldn't, how often do you trust these people to execute DROP DATABASE <typo_database_name_which_happens_to_be_real>? There is a big difference between programmers who can put in typos in a sentence in a code comment, and the kind of ones we are talking about.
- hellofunk 8y ago
  I've deployed tens of thousands of lines of Clojure for a company over several years, and I still find that I occasionally destructure a map with the wrong keyword and I end up with nil accidentally. It's frustrating as much now as it has ever been. Because the app just crashes instead of a simple compiler check that most languages would offer to capture simple stuff like this.