6 ms·

About half the bugs I've seen were caused either by poor variable naming or single entry/single exit violations I honestly can't remember seeing a bug caused b

About half the bugs I've seen were caused either by poor variable naming or single entry/single exit violations I honestly can't remember seeing a bug caused by either. Sorry. Obviously, experiences vary quite a bit in this respect. From what I've seen, the most common causes of bugs are: 1. Off-by-one errors. 2. Platform incompatibility. 3. Allocation issues (C/C++) 4. Shared state problems. 5. Not releasing/closing resources. Function returns? Variable names? They just don't figure.

edw519 19y ago
Single entry/single exit refers to ANY process, not just functions. Don't underestimate the hell who can go through with poor variable naming. Case in point: 2 months ago, a client needed significant changes to a major process in their app. (I had 2 weeks.) This process was a BASIC subroutine called by 16 other processes. Now get this: It was 2800 lines of code with one entry and 16 different exits. It was written in 1991 and had been modified 68 times before I came along. Here are a few of the variables: A, AA, AAA, AAAA, B, BB, BBB, BBBB, C, CC, CCC, CCCC, INFO, FORM1, FORM2, FORM3, HOLD.FORM2, OLD.FORM2, ORIG.FORM2, STUFF, DUMMY1, DUMMY2, DUMMY3... You get the idea. I spent 4 days renaming variables before I could start refactoring. There were some variables I never did figure out. I rewrote the program (550 lines) and hit the deadline. I uncovered over 20 undocumented bugs. I wonder what it will look like 5 years from now. Everything I write new is either Javascript or PHP. Now that my startup is ramping up, soon I won't have to deal with any of this old stuff any more. (Aside: I wonder how much production code in the world today is over 10 years old. And how much has been modified over 10 times?)
- Tichy 19y ago
  Sounds as if multiple exits were the least of the problems of that code.
  - edw519 19y ago
    Welcome to my life.

edw519 19y ago

Single entry/single exit refers to ANY process, not just functions. Don't underestimate the hell who can go through with poor variable naming. Case in point: 2 months ago, a client needed significant changes to a major process in their app. (I had 2 weeks.) This process was a BASIC subroutine called by 16 other processes. Now get this: It was 2800 lines of code with one entry and 16 different exits. It was written in 1991 and had been modified 68 times before I came along. Here are a few of the variables: A, AA, AAA, AAAA, B, BB, BBB, BBBB, C, CC, CCC, CCCC, INFO, FORM1, FORM2, FORM3, HOLD.FORM2, OLD.FORM2, ORIG.FORM2, STUFF, DUMMY1, DUMMY2, DUMMY3... You get the idea. I spent 4 days renaming variables before I could start refactoring. There were some variables I never did figure out. I rewrote the program (550 lines) and hit the deadline. I uncovered over 20 undocumented bugs. I wonder what it will look like 5 years from now. Everything I write new is either Javascript or PHP. Now that my startup is ramping up, soon I won't have to deal with any of this old stuff any more. (Aside: I wonder how much production code in the world today is over 10 years old. And how much has been modified over 10 times?)

Tichy 19y ago
Sounds as if multiple exits were the least of the problems of that code.
- edw519 19y ago
  Welcome to my life.