On Thursday, 25 July 2013 at 20:28:54 UTC, bearophile wrote:
Peter Alexander:
- What's safe and unsafe is very subjective.
There are large bodies of people that count bugs in code, and
correlate them with coding practices. They have created
language subsets like C for automotive industry, C++ for
aviation, code for space missions, Ada language and its
successive refinements like Ada2012, SPARK subset of Ada. There
are lot of people trying sideways solutions, at Microsoft
(Spec#, Liquid typing, etc), dependent typing (ATS language),
and so on and on, even Haskell variants. Lot of this stuff is
not based on statistical data, but there is also some hard data
that has shaped some of those very strict coding guidelines.
There are several serious studies in the field of coding
safety. Dismissing all that decades old work with a 'very
subjective' is unjust.
Allow me to put it another way by way of analogy: health. We know
from medical studies what kinds of things are healthy, and what
things are unhealthy. However, if I were to present 10 people,
and witness their actions for a week, would anyone be able to
accurately order them on their "healthiness"? Would every medical
expert arrive at the same ordering?
Maybe subjective is the wrong word to use. Maybe what I meant was
"difficult to quantify".
