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In that world you have bugs lying in wait inside the code ready to rear their head at inopportune times, better to not allow their existence at all. Also in ter
by anonnona 14y ago
In that world you have bugs lying in wait inside the code ready to rear their head at inopportune times, better to not allow their existence at all. Also in terms of difficulty of fixing bugs its a lot easier to fix bugs at compile time on your machine then it is later on in the release cycle. I think this kind of attitude is the reason why maintenance is the most expensive part of software development. It's also the work involving the most drudgery.
- barrkel 14y agoIn my experience, the two biggest reasons for expensive maintenance are (a) not all the code is understood by the people maintaining the system because past maintainers have moved on, and (b) assumptions have been made for performance or simplicity reasons that remove abstraction boundaries and embed assumptions about how the whole works inside different parts of the system, such that when one part needs major change, many other parts also need careful change; this is made worse by (a), because later maintainers usually only understand a subset of the individual parts. This isn't something easily fixed by a compiler or language feature. There's no magic bullet. Bugs "lying in wait" are a minor problem; if they lie in wait long enough, they are almost by definition not a problem at all.