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Definitely nice to have tools (compiler warnings, static analyzers) that can keep you from hurting yourself. Of course many projects don’t use them, for various reasons. I wonder: is turning on full compiler warnings, then fixing them - is it making my software better, or just satisfying some type of neuroticism?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. Original title is “Zig: A programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity – Andrew Kelley” and “Software should be perfect” is much more sensational.
If you look at the video, you'll see that "Software Should Be Perfect" is the title slide of the talk (you don't even have to click play, it's there at the start). And then the first words out of the speaker's mouth (other than a sound check) are "I'm going to try to convince all you that software should be perfect". The "original title" you're referring to is what the person who uploaded the talk to youtube titled t…
Definitely nice to have tools (compiler warnings, static analyzers) that can keep you from hurting yourself. Of course many projects don’t use them, for various reasons. I wonder: is turning on full compiler warnings, then fixing them - is it making my software better, or just satisfying some type of neuroticism?
It's not neurosis if it has a useful purpose.
Oh come on, we already know that logical systems cannot even self reconcile it's own promises, as Gödel proved, now someone claim software should be perfect?! Edit: the original title does not mention perfect.
Come on, a title like that isn’t meant to be taken too seriously. And you’re reaching a bit far. You can write a perfect function that adds two 32 bit integers. There is a subset of code that can be written perfectly. Especially if you don’t need Turing completeness to write it. Zig just tries it’s best to make it easy to write as much as possible of low level code in a perfect way.
how ? the problem of adding two 32 bits integers is itself imperfect since you may at some point have big integers to sum, so any solution is inherently flawed, too
So... the perfect programming language has error-prone manual memory management and rampant undefined behaviour (well at least it can build the code to crash instead of “nasal deamons”)? Yeah right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come on, a title like that isn’t meant to be taken too seriously. And you’re reaching a bit far. You can write a perfect function that adds two 32 bit integers. There is a subset of code that can be written perfectly. Especially if you don’t need Turing completeness to write it. Zig just tries it’s best to make it easy to write as much as possible of low level code in a perfect way.
> You can write a perfect function that adds two 32 bit integers. how ? the problem of adding two 32 bits integers is itself imperfect since you may at some point have big integers to sum, so any solution is inherently flawed, too
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look at the video, you'll see that "Software Should Be Perfect" is the title slide of the talk (you don't even have to click play, it's there at the start). And then the first words out of the speaker's mouth (other than a sound check) are "I'm going to try to convince all you that software should be perfect". The "original title" you're referring to is what the person who uploaded the talk to youtube titled t…
Questioning if someone read the article or, in this case, watched the video is against the Hacker News guidelines. If you feel a commenter is not fully engaged with the topic you should decline to continue the thread.
P.S. Yes, I know I'm also engaged in meta-discussion now. I can afford it.
This is more than a small piece of irony with a somewhat artificial example. Often, there simply isn't very much you can do with an error. In a SaaS world, you might not be able to tell the user what wrong, in order to not disclose some private information. You can log the error, but only if the network is available, and you can only log it to disk if the disk isn't full.
And then there are cases where you could try to explain the error to the user, but the reasons are very complicated and/or require intimate knowledge of the architecture to make sense, and/or require intimate subject knowledge to understand, or even obscure legal reasons.