BCS wrote:
Hello dsimcha,
== Quote from BCS (n...@anon.com)'s article
I don't have a link or anything but I remember hearing about a study
MS did
about finding bugs and what they found is that every reasonably
effective
tool they looked at found the same amount of bugs (ok, within
shouting distance,
close enough that none of them could be said to be pointless) but
different
bugs. The way to find the most bugs is to attack it from many angle.
If I
can have a language that can totally prevent one class of bugs in
vast swaths
of code, that's a good thing, even if it does jack for another class
of bugs.
Right, but the point I was making is that you hit diminishing returns
on static verification very quickly. If you have even very basic
static verification, it will be enough to tilt the vast majority of
your bugs towards high-level logic/algorithm bugs.
OTOH, if it's done well (doesn't get in my way) and's built into the
language, any static verification is free from the end users standpoint.
Heck, even it it gets in your way but only for strange cases where your
hacking around, it's still useful because it tells you where the high
risk code is.
There's a really interesting synergy between pure and unit tests. It's
much easier to test a function properly if it's pure -- you know that
there are no globals anywhere which you have to worry about.
