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Re: Really?

From anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups comp.lang.forth
Subject Re: Really?
Date 2017-02-11 15:32 +0000
Organization Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
Message-ID <2017Feb11.163227@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> (permalink)
References <1239a88b-a574-401b-9454-50ac7e000049@googlegroups.com> <2017Feb7.183554@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <87k291w3et.fsf@nightsong.com> <2017Feb9.095708@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <o7hn2m$u4h$1@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl>

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albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) writes:
>In article <2017Feb9.095708@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
>Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
><SNIP>
>>
>>That's totally contrary to my perception (except that, yes, the static
>>typechecking believers have this mantra; that does not mean that it is
>>true).  The kind of bugs that compile-time type checking catches or
>>that run-time type checking catches tend to be the easy ones.  If you
>>catch such a bug after a long time (because you did not test for it,
>>and apparently the users did not exercise that case, either), it is
>>still an easy bug.  And aging does not make code more valuable.
>
>Of course it does. Industrial and corporate IT-users know that
>very well. They are extremely reluctant to abandon working
>systems. It is not so much that the bugs are out, but the bugs
>are known, and what is more important the larger misconceptions
>are caught, like the idea that a train has at least three carriages,
>a locomotive on each side and the payload. (An example from
>my practice with incidious consequences.)
>
>Then there is statistics. If a large system has run for 365
>days without maior faults, The chance is about less than one
>in 365 that it will fail this day.

The context of the discussion was *not* the value of the code to end
users who only use the code, and can only assess it through use, and
cannot improve it themselves in any way.  In any case, the value
according to the end-user metric you describe is completely
independent of the programming language, because the programming
language does not come into play here, and the end users don't deal
with the source code anyway.

The context of the discussion was the value of the code to the
developers and their organization.

There is one aspect where the value rises with age: It becomes more
expensive over time to rewrite the code, because the knowledge about
the code vanishes from memory (or the people with the memory leave the
organization), so that knowledge has to be reacquired from the
documentation, from the source code, or (if that has been lost)
through various reverse engineering techniques.  That, too is
independent of the programming language, except that languages where
programs are distributed in source are immune to the "lost source
code" problem. OTOH, the requirements may change, reducing the value
of the existing code.

For a case where bugs are found after exercising the code a lot, I
read something along the lines of that you need to process 10 million
lines of code to find all bugs in a register allocator.  These kinds
of bugs are not caught by sophisticated static type checkers (I talked
to (IIRC) Lal George, the guy who did the register allocator for
SML/NJ, and when I talked to him he said he really had big problems
debugging it), and certainly not by dynamic type checking (which tends
to be much less sophisticated), so the value added by fixing these
kinds of bugs is added "late" in any language (of course, if you do
extensive testing from the start, the "late" will be earlier than if
not).

- anton
-- 
M. Anton Ertl  http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
     New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
   EuroForth 2016: http://www.euroforth.org/ef16/

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Really? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2017-02-06 06:46 -0800
  Re: Really? foxaudioresearch@gmail.com - 2017-02-06 07:20 -0800
  Re: Really? polymorph self <jackvanc3@gmail.com> - 2017-02-06 08:58 -0800
  Re: Really? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2017-02-06 13:06 -0500
  Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-06 11:25 -0800
  Re: Really? "HAA" <someone@microsoft.com> - 2017-02-07 11:45 +1100
  Re: Really? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2017-02-06 15:38 -1000
    Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-07 09:50 -0800
  Re: Really? Rod Pemberton <NeedNotReplyHere@xrsevnneqk.cem> - 2017-02-06 23:39 -0500
    Re: Really? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2017-02-07 08:04 -0800
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      Re: Really? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2017-02-07 23:42 -0800
        Re: Really? "HAA" <someone@microsoft.com> - 2017-02-08 20:12 +1100
          Re: Really? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2017-02-08 02:44 -0800
          Re: Really? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2017-02-08 17:48 +0000
            Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-08 18:43 +0000
              Re: Really? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2017-02-08 15:24 -0800
            Re: Really? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2017-02-08 16:26 -0800
    Re: Really? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2017-02-07 22:45 -0800
      Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-07 22:50 -0800
    Re: Really? clozaga@gmail.com - 2017-02-08 21:03 -0800
      Re: Really? clozaga@gmail.com - 2017-02-08 21:04 -0800
      Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-11 20:01 -0800
        Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-12 16:26 +0000
          Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-12 16:52 -0800
            Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-13 09:49 +0000
              Re: Really? minforth@arcor.de - 2017-02-13 07:03 -0800
              Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-13 13:41 -0800
                Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-13 22:32 +0000
                Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-15 11:42 -0800
                Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-15 20:41 +0000
                Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-17 09:42 -0800
                Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-17 22:22 +0000
          Re: Really? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2017-02-12 19:24 -1000
            Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-13 08:49 +0000
  Re: Really? stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2017-02-07 11:01 +0000
    Re: Really? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2017-02-07 03:06 -0800
      Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-07 09:35 -0800
      Re: Really? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2017-02-07 17:35 +0000
        Re: Really? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2017-02-07 23:24 -0800
          Re: Really? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2017-02-09 08:57 +0000
            Re: Really? albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2017-02-09 13:24 +0100
              Re: Really? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2017-02-11 15:32 +0000
      Re: Really? stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2017-02-07 20:42 +0000
        Re: Really? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2017-02-07 13:58 -1000
          Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-07 21:51 -0800
            Re: Really? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2017-02-08 01:47 -0500
              Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-07 22:52 -0800
                Re: Really? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2017-02-08 03:34 -0500
                Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-08 13:43 +0000
                Re: Really? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2017-02-08 15:39 -1000
                Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-08 22:39 -0800
                Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-09 08:56 +0000
                Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-09 14:36 -0800
                Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-10 08:33 +0000
                Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-09 09:03 +0000
                Re: Really? albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2017-02-09 10:51 +0100
                Re: Really? john <anon@example.com> - 2017-02-09 11:54 +0000
                Re: Really? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2017-02-09 09:30 -1000
                Re: Really? stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2017-02-09 14:14 +0000
                Re: Really? Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-09 14:37 +0000
                Re: Really? stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2017-02-09 15:24 +0000
                Re: Really? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2017-02-09 12:01 -0800
                Re: Really? stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2017-02-10 01:09 +0000
                Re: Really? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2017-02-09 18:19 -0800
                Re: Really? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2017-02-09 16:30 -1000
                Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-09 19:16 -0800
                Re: Really? stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2017-02-10 16:29 +0000
                OT: [ was re: Really?] Foreign aid Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-10 17:30 +0000
                Re: OT: [ was re: Really?] Foreign aid Cecil Bayona <cbayona@cbayona.com> - 2017-02-10 11:46 -0600
                Re: OT: [ was re: Really?] Foreign aid Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2017-02-10 11:54 -0600
                Re: OT: [ was re: Really?] Foreign aid Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-10 18:05 +0000
                Re: OT: [ was re: Really?] Foreign aid Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-10 17:55 +0000
                Re: OT: [ was re: Really?] Foreign aid Cecil Bayona <cbayona@cbayona.com> - 2017-02-10 12:04 -0600
                Re: OT: [ was re: Really?] Foreign aid Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-10 18:07 +0000
                Re: OT: [ was re: Really?] Foreign aid Cecil Bayona <cbayona@cbayona.com> - 2017-02-10 12:57 -0600
                Re: OT: [ was re: Really?] Foreign aid Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-10 19:26 +0000
                Re: OT: [ was re: Really?] Foreign aid Cecil Bayona <cbayona@cbayona.com> - 2017-02-10 14:04 -0600
                Re: OT: [ was re: Really?] Foreign aid Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2017-02-11 09:35 +0000
                Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-10 16:33 -0800
                Static type checking (was: Really?) anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2017-02-10 11:07 +0000
                Re: Really? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2017-02-11 15:16 +0000
                Re: Really? Cecil Bayona <cbayona@cbayona.com> - 2017-02-11 10:20 -0600
                Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-11 19:02 -0800
                Re: Really? albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2017-02-10 17:31 +0100
                Re: Really? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2017-02-08 15:34 -1000
              Re: Really? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2017-02-07 21:15 -1000
              Re: Really? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2017-02-07 23:46 -0800
        Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-07 22:47 -0800
          Re: Really? Ron Aaron <rambamist@gmail.com> - 2017-02-08 08:52 +0200
    Re: Really? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2017-02-07 06:29 -0500
      Re: Really? stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2017-02-07 20:47 +0000
        Re: Really? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2017-02-07 16:23 -0500
          Re: Really? stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2017-02-08 09:47 +0000
            Re: Really? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2017-02-08 05:13 -0500
              Re: Really? stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2017-02-08 11:23 +0000
    Re: Really? Cecil Bayona <cbayona@cbayona.com> - 2017-02-07 09:49 -0600
  Really? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2017-02-09 00:30 -0800
    Re: Really? "HAA" <someone@microsoft.com> - 2017-02-10 10:32 +1100
      Re: Really? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2017-02-09 17:22 -0800

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