On Friday, 1 November 2013 at 13:52:01 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
On Thursday, 31 October 2013 at 21:36:11 UTC, eles wrote:
much more honest because it squarely puts the blame where it belongs, viz. with the programmer who made the error. The
That's in an ideal world. When different people work on the same code base, it is not so easy to tell who made the error. Look at a race condition when neither of two or three developers takes the mutex. Who made the error then? All that you have is a buggy program (btw, error implies something about being systematic, while bugs are not necessarily) or a program with errors. But, telling *who* made the error is not that simple. And, in most of the cases, would be also quite useless. We do not hunt people, but bugs :p (sorry, it sounds better than hunting errors :)
testing may convincingly demonstrate the presence of bugs, but can never demonstrate their absence.
Everybody knows that. Alas, testing is not the silver bullet, but at least is a bullet. Just imagine how software shipped without any testing will behave: "it compiles! let's ship it!" Corporations are not chasing the phyilosophical perfections, they are pragmatic. The thing that somewhat works and they have on the table is testing. In a perfect world, you'd have perfect programmers, perfect programs. The thing is, you are not living in a perfect world. Tests are not perfect neither but are among the best that you can get.
