The libraries of pre-written routines have source code somewhere. From my point of view, it is part of the code. It's easy to believe those routines must have been thoroughly tested by whoever provides them, and hard to get time or budget to check whether they do what they are supposed to do. And I agree, as it has become so easy to push…
The libraries of pre-written routines have source code somewhere. From my point of view, it is part of the code. It's easy to believe those routines must have been thoroughly tested by whoever provides them, and hard to get time or budget to check whether they do what they are supposed to do. And I agree, as it has become so easy to push updates out for software, an attitude seems to have set in that I'd describe as "Well, if we didn't get it quite right, we'll tweak it tomorrow." When it was hard to update software, we worked hard to get it right before we sent it out.
Many years ago I ran into an astounding statistic: In a software program of 12 lines, the probability of at least one bug is 75%. (That's when it has first been written.) Now we depend on programs with thousands to millions of lines of source code. It's really hard to test all the modules, and test how they interact, properly and fully.
You and I go pretty far back with this stuff. A lot has changed. But the fundamentals of how to do it right haven't changed.
The libraries of pre-written routines have source code somewhere. From my point of view, it is part of the code. It's easy to believe those routines must have been thoroughly tested by whoever provides them, and hard to get time or budget to check whether they do what they are supposed to do. And I agree, as it has become so easy to push updates out for software, an attitude seems to have set in that I'd describe as "Well, if we didn't get it quite right, we'll tweak it tomorrow." When it was hard to update software, we worked hard to get it right before we sent it out.
Many years ago I ran into an astounding statistic: In a software program of 12 lines, the probability of at least one bug is 75%. (That's when it has first been written.) Now we depend on programs with thousands to millions of lines of source code. It's really hard to test all the modules, and test how they interact, properly and fully.
You and I go pretty far back with this stuff. A lot has changed. But the fundamentals of how to do it right haven't changed.