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The worst thing to happen to programming you say? Worse than null-terminated strings in C? Worse than null being return on failure of dynamic memory allocatio

The worst thing to happen to programming you say? Worse than null-terminated strings in C? Worse than null being return on failure of dynamic memory allocation? Worse than nullability of columns in sql which Tony Hoare (the author) called "my Billion-dollar mistake"? Worse than the Knight Capital update bug that caused a $440million loss in 45minutes meaning Knight went out of business and was taken over? Worse than the innovative design of Therac-25 that caused deaths and serious injuries by giving patients 100x the intended doses of radiation? Worse than the Fujitsu Horizon system that lead to deaths due to stress and suicide, innocent people being put in jail etc...? I could go on but you get my point. What a staggeringly stupid headline in service of clickbait.

primitivesuave 2y ago
The net effect of these "syntactic sugar" diatribes has been many lifetimes of wasted developer effort in migrating between programming languages and frameworks, and countless products/investment dollars fizzling into oblivion because the developers couldn't stop worrying about how pretty the code looks.
DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
> Worse than the Fujitsu Horizon system that lead to deaths due to stress and suicide, innocent people being put in jail etc...? Horizon had really bad bugs, yes - but it wasn't the software that caused the cover-up or the miscarriages of justice: it was the management of (then-)privatized Post Office Ltd that decided they could not afford the risk of losing big government contracts if any word got-out that the system was making fundamental ledger errors. Most of everything else can be blamed on the sheer separation between the devs and the actual end-users: these problems could have been caught and fixed if the Horizon tech-support people weren't 100% subordinate to upper-management: if I learned that our support people were using phone-scripts that were as bad as the PO's I'd threaten to resign). (though I'd argue the real fundamental problem here wasn't technical, nor managerial, but a simple consequence of the UK's entrenched class-system: subpostmasters generally don't read Classics at Oxbridge, which means in the eyes of the establishment that they're probably the ones at fault) I'm not mad at the ICL/Fujitsu devs - they were severely understaffed (I gather it was literally just 4 people?), but I am disappointed (and in a state of disbelief) that they evidently didn't have any devs competent enough to know how to design a transactionally-safe retail POS system in the first place (and P.O.S. is the word...): hiring and retaining good people would have avoided this episode entirely (...though no-doubt something else would have led to a similar management scandal eventually - it's in the nature of almost all large UK businesses at this point.
gizmo 2y ago
The billion dollar mistake refers to pointers being nullable. Old school type systems not supporting the equivalent of Maybe<T>, basically. It's not specific to columns in sql. Async/Await is a relatively recent development and the author is free to argue it's bad paradigm that makes simple things way harder than they need to. It wouldn't be the first time our industry jumped on a very silly bandwagon! Calling something "the worst" is fine. It's not a literal claim and it doesn't deserve your scorn.

primitivesuave 2y ago

The net effect of these "syntactic sugar" diatribes has been many lifetimes of wasted developer effort in migrating between programming languages and frameworks, and countless products/investment dollars fizzling into oblivion because the developers couldn't stop worrying about how pretty the code looks.

DaiPlusPlus 2y ago

> Worse than the Fujitsu Horizon system that lead to deaths due to stress and suicide, innocent people being put in jail etc...? Horizon had really bad bugs, yes - but it wasn't the software that caused the cover-up or the miscarriages of justice: it was the management of (then-)privatized Post Office Ltd that decided they could not afford the risk of losing big government contracts if any word got-out that the system was making fundamental ledger errors. Most of everything else can be blamed on the sheer separation between the devs and the actual end-users: these problems could have been caught and fixed if the Horizon tech-support people weren't 100% subordinate to upper-management: if I learned that our support people were using phone-scripts that were as bad as the PO's I'd threaten to resign). (though I'd argue the real fundamental problem here wasn't technical, nor managerial, but a simple consequence of the UK's entrenched class-system: subpostmasters generally don't read Classics at Oxbridge, which means in the eyes of the establishment that they're probably the ones at fault) I'm not mad at the ICL/Fujitsu devs - they were severely understaffed (I gather it was literally just 4 people?), but I am disappointed (and in a state of disbelief) that they evidently didn't have any devs competent enough to know how to design a transactionally-safe retail POS system in the first place (and P.O.S. is the word...): hiring and retaining good people would have avoided this episode entirely (...though no-doubt something else would have led to a similar management scandal eventually - it's in the nature of almost all large UK businesses at this point.

gizmo 2y ago

The billion dollar mistake refers to pointers being nullable. Old school type systems not supporting the equivalent of Maybe<T>, basically. It's not specific to columns in sql. Async/Await is a relatively recent development and the author is free to argue it's bad paradigm that makes simple things way harder than they need to. It wouldn't be the first time our industry jumped on a very silly bandwagon! Calling something "the worst" is fine. It's not a literal claim and it doesn't deserve your scorn.