3 ms·

Ok, so you admit this was wild hyperbole: > It eliminates all sources of bugs,

by eitland 7y ago

carapace 7y ago
Hyperbole, yes, wild, no. My problem is I've been trying to get traction on this for years and no one is interested. (Although type-checking is finally getting some love. It's not all doom and gloom out there.) Most bugs could be prevented or eliminated automatically.† If we're not doing that then in what sense are we entitled to call ourselves "engineers"? (Just to bring it back around to the topic.) I mean, our bridges collapse all the time. This is not science? †See Alice Pascal https://www.templetons.com/brad/alice.html https://www.templetons.com/brad/alice.html > In a syntax directed editor, you edit a program, not a piece of text. The editor works directly on the program as a tree -- matching the syntax trees by which the language is structured. The units you work with are not lines and chracters (sic) but terms, expressions, statements and blocks. This is still just syntactic correctness, you can only enter syntactically-correct Pascal programs, no typos either, but I don't think it did type-checking or anything like that. But it illustrates my point that if you're typing text into an editor and hoping it correctly describes a computer program, you're doing it wrong.
- goto11 7y ago
  You might have a good case, but the way you present it makes it seem very disconnected from real-world development. Equating the most trivial kind of errors (which are caught by the compiler anyway) with "all sources of bugs" ignores the kind of bugs which are actually hard to prevent and might slip into production. But these are the kind of bugs developers are actually concerned about. Preventing editors from saving a file with a typo in it is a solution to a non-problem. If you want to interest people in these ideas, you should show how it can solve real problems.

3 ms·

Ok, so you admit this was wild hyperbole: > It eliminates all sources of bugs,

by eitland 7y ago

Ok, so you admit this was wild hyperbole: > It eliminates all sources of bugs,

carapace 7y ago
Hyperbole, yes, wild, no. My problem is I've been trying to get traction on this for years and no one is interested. (Although type-checking is finally getting some love. It's not all doom and gloom out there.) Most bugs could be prevented or eliminated automatically.† If we're not doing that then in what sense are we entitled to call ourselves "engineers"? (Just to bring it back around to the topic.) I mean, our bridges collapse all the time. This is not science? †See Alice Pascal https://www.templetons.com/brad/alice.html https://www.templetons.com/brad/alice.html > In a syntax directed editor, you edit a program, not a piece of text. The editor works directly on the program as a tree -- matching the syntax trees by which the language is structured. The units you work with are not lines and chracters (sic) but terms, expressions, statements and blocks. This is still just syntactic correctness, you can only enter syntactically-correct Pascal programs, no typos either, but I don't think it did type-checking or anything like that. But it illustrates my point that if you're typing text into an editor and hoping it correctly describes a computer program, you're doing it wrong.
- goto11 7y ago
  You might have a good case, but the way you present it makes it seem very disconnected from real-world development. Equating the most trivial kind of errors (which are caught by the compiler anyway) with "all sources of bugs" ignores the kind of bugs which are actually hard to prevent and might slip into production. But these are the kind of bugs developers are actually concerned about. Preventing editors from saving a file with a typo in it is a solution to a non-problem. If you want to interest people in these ideas, you should show how it can solve real problems.