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Treating the symptom: Pollute the codebase with warped code. Treating the cause: Use static analysis.

• dgb23 7y ago
  Alternatively there are languages, where this problem can't arise at all. In Clojure for example: (= ...) just tests for (actual) equality, while (def ...) assigns a symbol to a value, or (swap! atom f) changes the value of an atom (reference type).
• crdrost 7y ago
  Treating the cause's cause: use a programming language which makes a distinction between actions and values, so that an action-which-produces-a-boolean is not valid where a boolean is expected. Treating the cause's cause's cause: design your own programming language to be a strongly typed functional or logic programming language that is a descendant of the ideas in XSLT, where the attitude was “the most common thing you do in programming is to map one data structure into another, so let’s build the whole language around making those mappings easy first.” There can now be no confusion. Probably treating the cause's cause's cause's cause is something like “just use Excel for everything, why are you using these other languages?”
  • peterwwillis 7y ago
    > Probably treating the cause's cause's cause's cause is something like “just use Excel for everything, why are you using these other languages?” It's be harder to get things done, but we'd be more certain about them