Re: Larkin, Hobbs let's meet in the middle.
- From: Jan Panteltje <pNaonStpealmtje@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:19:28 GMT
On a sunny day (Sun, 03 Aug 2008 10:33:32 -0700) it happened John Larkin
<jjlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<6fpb9456ov4b8ln883e095aj1lag7v7hbr@xxxxxxx>:
Everybody makes mistakes.
Yes. But accepting iteration and failure is self-fulfilling. With
care, most hardware can be right the first time, and most software can
be done on time, bug-free. It's a habit, or not.
Yes, agreed, all I can say if you can do it, keep with it!
So... OK Phil, I agree, after claims of perfection we should let others check too ;-)
I program embedded stuff in assembly, which is more likely to
obviously be broken when something's wrong. Higher-level stuff can
have problems in libraries, memory leaks, deadlocks, mysterious hangs,
stuff like that.
LOL I remember this guy who looked a a piece of software I wrote,
and screamed on the Internet: 'You Have a Memory Leak'.
So, as it had run hundreds of hours on my system,
and did not seem to go into swapping... I asked 'how do you know?'
So he replied 'I looked at the code'.
He never _ran_ the code though....
And I *read* my code to debug it, before and after it's actually run.
I think that's the best way to generate solid code: read, comment,
rewrite, clarify, eliminate risk. Hack-and-test-and-iterate is the
path to bugs, in hardware or software.
Well, I guess I am lazy in a way, in the old days I wrote perfect asm,
and I am still doing OK with for example PIC, some other micros,
FPGA, but in 'C' I sort of depend on the -Wall (warn on everything)
compiler flag to alert me to what I did *not* think of.
Compiling with -Wall on gcc is fun :-)
That leads to iterations, it is probably OK, but perhaps somebody
could get it right first time.
This theory may be interesting: The easier it is to modify a design,
the less care the author will put into the initial version, and the
more bugs will be shipped. Consider
The Space Shuttle (first liftoff was manned, to orbit)
Bridges
Airplanes
Skyscrapers
...
Pacemakers
ASIC design
Hardware (pcb) design
FPGA design
Software
See? If somebody figures that bugs are inevitable but they're easy to
fix, they'll hack-and-debug. And they won't find all the bugs, because
they won't really care, and won't have the time anyhow.
mm, yes, that is true, and sometimes I work that way.
Just wrote a small email client, basically just to send email, one
that does _not_ use 'sendmail', does look up the MX records, etc...
It is a state machine, after getting it all working and planting it on
the eeePC, the server tells me the Vodafone IP I got assigned has been added
to the spam block database.. that really pissed me of.
Sometimes they block port 25, but maybe they just entered it to that spam database
to block port 25.. dunno.
But anyways that code iterated as I got deeper and deeper into what
was actually required (only had some vague wish list).
It is pretty good now, should release it as GPL perhaps.
Yes I watched some of the space shuttle launches, would not want to be on board....
But would probably be fool enough to board one of my own designs ;-)
Space X or whatever they are called had a launch failure recently, lost
3 sats... Now that is a private enterprise, their third failure,
see, Von Braun also iterated a lot :-)
.
- References:
- Larkin, Hobbs let's meet in the middle.
- From: Jan Panteltje
- Re: Larkin, Hobbs let's meet in the middle.
- From: John Larkin
- Larkin, Hobbs let's meet in the middle.
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