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You are never taught how to build quality software

florianbellmann.com

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Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#191

Post by realprimoh »

darth_aardvark wrote: post #151

Unrelated to the article, I could immediately identify the image used as definitely AI-generated. But I can't identify any reason why . It's a normal picture of a stone brick wall. Yet I'm 100% sure it's AI. No shame to the author for their choice; replacing stock images with generated ones is a great use case. It's spooky to me that we've been so quickly trained to identify this subconsciously.

AI-generated images have an unnatural "smoothness" to them whereas reality is more imperfect. At least that's my hypothesis.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#192

Post by bluGill »

duped wrote: post #133
bluGill wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because like it or not most people are going to university to get a better jobs. Companies like university educated people because they learn deep thinking. However they often come out lacking important skills that are needed. Sure there are a few going to university just for the fun of it. However most are expecting a job. Thus universities should train and emphasize thinking in more specific areas. > "I'll never us…

> However they often come out lacking important skills that are needed. Companies that offer the jobs are the ones that need to offer the job training. > (I think this is the point you were trying to make?) Not really, it's that university education is kind of meta/self serving (the goal is not to train X number of students to do Y jobs, it's to give every student at the institution what that institution defines to b…

What society needs is the second order effect though. I don't care about education for the sake of education, I can for what education can do for me/society. Now some of what most institutions define as a good education is good for society (the ability to think is very useful), but I don't value/support education because of arbitrary definitions that an institution might come up with. I value/support education because people who have education tend to show specific abilities in society that I want more people to have. The more universities are in line with that and try to produce that the more I value/support them. (note that I didn't not formally define what those things are - this is a tricky topic that I'm sure to get wrong if I tried!)

When institutions allow student to take degrees that society finds less valuable (art,music...) they are doing society a disservice by not producing what society needs. Now if the student is wealthy (not rich) enough to afford that the price then I don't care: I don't need to impose my values on anyone else. However most people in a university are not that wealthy (most are young) and so if the degree granted isn't valuable to society the university robbed that student.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#193

Post by kevindamm »

kevindamm wrote: post #183
topaz0 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There are plenty of things that can be proved, it's just that there exist true statements that cannot be proved.

That's closer, but still not quite right. There are well-formed statements that can be proved but which assert that its godelized value represents a non-provable theorem. Therefore, you must accept that it and its contradiction are both provable (leading to an inconsistent system), or not accept it and now there are provable theorems that cannot be expressed in the system. Furthermore, that this can be constructed fr…

The important thing to note is that it doesn't have anything to do with truth or truth-values of propositions. It breaks the fundamental operation of the provability of a statement.

And, since many proofs are done by assuming a statement's inverse and trying to prove a contradiction, having a known contradiction in the set of provable statements can effectively allow any statement to be proven. Keeping the contradiction is not actually an option.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#195

Post by bluGill »

mschuster91 wrote: post #134
bluGill wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because like it or not most people are going to university to get a better jobs. Companies like university educated people because they learn deep thinking. However they often come out lacking important skills that are needed. Sure there are a few going to university just for the fun of it. However most are expecting a job. Thus universities should train and emphasize thinking in more specific areas. > "I'll never us…

> Companies like university educated people because they learn deep thinking. No. Companies love hiring higher-ed graduates because it removes a lot of cost and risk for them: - hiring only people with degrees weeds out everyone unable to cope with a high-stress environment, for whatever reason - crucially, also including people who would normally be protected by ADA or its equivalent provisions in Europe. - it weeds…

> and among top-earning job, males still utterly dominate

And thus you destroyed you whole point: females dominate universities these days.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#197

Post by ponector »

datadeft wrote: post #90
KeplerBoy wrote: post #18

> It will be necessary to deliver software without bugs in time. Seems like a pretty bad premise to start an article on quality software. If you believe you can ship bug free code, it's time to switch careers.

Spicy take on engineering. Why do we accept this for software when do not accept the same in other engineering domains?

Imagine same approache in other domains:

Team are flying the airplane, the se time rebuild it to the zeppelin, testing new engines inflight.

Or construction. Let's build apartment block, but for few apartments we will test new materials, new layout, etc. Once there are walls of the first apartments we will let people live there. We will build how we can, according to the napkin plan. In the end we will put all tenants in and stress test strength of the structures. Or one day people return home and their apartments have totally different design and layout because someone from the HOA decided so to get a promotion.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#198

Post by wvenable »

codegeek wrote: post #87
KeplerBoy wrote: post #18

> It will be necessary to deliver software without bugs in time. Seems like a pretty bad premise to start an article on quality software. If you believe you can ship bug free code, it's time to switch careers.

Yep. If you have written production grade software at real companies, you know that the moment you make that new commit (even if 1 liner change), you are now ready to accept that it could break something. yes you can do your unit tests, integration test, User Acceptance Tests and what not. But every code change = new possible bug that you may not be able to catch until it occurs to a customer. Whenever I hear a devel…

It's always amazing when I get a bug report from a product that's been running bug free in production for years with minimal changes but some user did some combination of things that had never been done and it blows up.

Usually it's something extremely simple to fix too.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#199

Post by bluGill »

timeagain wrote: post #19
johngossman wrote: post #17

There are Computer Engineering programs and a few universities that really emphasize internships and hands on practice. But at many universities, the CS department came out of the Math department and is focused on theory. Chemistry isn't Chemical Engineering either. I think that's okay. University isn't just a trade school--the idea behind almost any degree is to train the mind and demonstrate an ability to master co…

Yeah but at those internships you aren’t taught how to build quality software, just how to ship a SPA that connects to an API in 15 weeks (or you’re not hired). It is a good peek into the professional software world though!

Before you can write quality software you need to be able to write large software. Most interns I see are learning how to work on non-trivial programs as this is their first chance to see something non-trivial. Then they get a "real job" and are shoved into extremely large programs.

Writing a thousand lines of bug free code isn't that hard, so the need for QA practices won't be apparent. Then you get the ten thousand line intern project and discover things are not always that easy. Then we throw you into a multi-million line project and good luck: you need a lot of that QA stuff to make it work.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#200

Post by kevindamm »

Verdex wrote: post #172
akhosravian wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a CS academic or a mathematician, but don’t Godel’s incompleteness theorems preclude a formal proof of correctness?

No. Godel means that we can't have an algorithmic box that we put a program into and out comes a true/false statement of halting. Nothing is stopping you from writing the proof manually for each program that you want to prove properties for. ALSO, you can write sub-turing complete programs. Those are allowed to have automated halting proofs (see idris et al).

What you're talking about is actually the Church-Turing thesis and the halting problem.

While, yes, computability and provability are very closely related, it's important to get attribution correct.

More details on what Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem really said are in a sibling comment so I won't repeat them here.

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