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January 10, 2022 04:34 am

Ask Slashdot: Why Do Programmers Make So Many Mistakes?

A technical question occurred to Slashdot reader OneHundredAndTen when filling out forms online. "Are the programmers responsible for them stupid, incompetent, lazy, or all rolled into one?" They provided two real-world examples that inspired the question: - "I made up a company name that happened to contain a digit. When I submitted the information I got a big fat error diagnostic about this box, to the effect that numerals are not allowed in a company name. So you know, people â" no digits allowed in your company's name, or else!" - "In a free text box limited to 1,000 characters (already stupid, arguably) the caption explicitly banned the following characters in the "free text" because they can interfere with the correct processing of input..." ~!@#$%^&*()|' This prompted a response from UnknownSoldier (Slashdot reader #67,820), who shared the humorous "Murphy's Computer Law" aphorisms from 1984, calling them "sadly still appropriate" and referring to one in particular: "There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over."In general Web programmers tend to be extremely lazy (undisciplined.) They don't value correctness because that would take "work". I'm not just singling out web programmers here, look at how many programmers fuck up the TRIVIAL example of FizzBuzz. For example, here are two examples where incompetent programmers make tons of assumptions. * Falsehoods programmers believe about names * Falsehoods programmers believe about time As they say the devil is in the details, or edge case, as it may be. Programming is littered with edge cases so bad programmers "stick their head in the sand and ignore the problem hoping it will go away." Doing it right costs time, money, and skill. Management is partially to blame. Bad programmers are to blame. Schools are to blame. There are many factors why we end up with shit software like the use case you just described. And now you know why old programmers become grumpy. Modern software is slow, bloated, with layers of abstraction piled upon abstraction, library upon library. You spend more time "decoding" code and reverse engineering what was done because no one ever took the time to comment it properly for the next guy. Use these examples of "stupid shit" to be a better programmer. Agree? Disagree? Share your own thoughts in the comments. Why do programmers make so many mistakes?

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