3 ms·
IMHO off-by-one errors only deserve to be there for the irony. In reality, they are orders of magnitude easier then the other two.
by moring 4y ago
IMHO off-by-one errors only deserve to be there for the irony. In reality, they are orders of magnitude easier then the other two.
- javajosh 4y agoYes, off-by-one is easier to fix, but far more common. Hence if suffering is the product of frequency and difficulty, then off-by-one suffering (S=FD+1) is the same order as cache invalidation (S=FD).
- filbo 4y ago
- stavros 4y agoThat is, indeed, the joke.
- Dylan16807 4y agoNo? They're talking about something mostly orthogonal to the joke, which is whether it actually deserves to be in the list. It's the difference between "here's three very hard things, let's make a joke with them" and "here's two very hard things, but we can make a joke if we shoehorn in a less-hard thing".
- stavros 4y agoBut that is why it's there, as a joke, not as an actual hard thing.
- Dylan16807 4y agoAre you sure? I think it is intended as an actually hard problem and is forming a joke. I've never interpreted "oh it's not actually hard" as being part of the joke.
- moring 4y agoI always assumed that at the time it was a relatively harder problem, with lower-level languages that are mostly array-focused, no real built-in containers and no for-each support. This was cured with better programming languages. On the other hand, cache invalidation and naming things are problems that grow harder and harder when systems get more complex, which they obviously did.
- willis936 4y agoPerhaps the category was improperly named.