Geek Sublime by Vikram Chandra

Author:Vikram Chandra
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-326-1
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2014-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

Programmers work doggedly toward correctness, but the sheer size and complexity of software ensures that bugs lurk within. A bug is, of course, a flaw or fault in a program that produces unexpected results. In 1986, the award-winning researcher and academic Jon Bentley published a book that is now widely regarded as a classic, Programming Pearls. One of the algorithms he implemented was for binary search, a method of finding a value in a sorted array, which was first published in 1946. In 2006, decades after the publication of Bentley’s book—by which time his particular implementation had been copied and used many thousands of times—one of his erstwhile students, Joshua Bloch, discovered that under certain conditions this technique could manifest a bug.16 Bloch published his finding under a justly panic-raising headline, “Extra, Extra—Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken.” He wrote:

The general lesson that I take away from this bug is humility: It is hard to write even the smallest piece of code correctly, and our whole world runs on big, complex pieces of code.

Careful design is great. Testing is great. Formal methods are great. Code reviews are great. Static analysis is great. But none of these things alone are sufficient to eliminate bugs: They will always be with us. A bug can exist for half a century despite our best efforts to exterminate it.17

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