Wednesday 31 July 2013

What I think about bugs

Good old captain told me "there will always be bugs". Those words ring in my ears. I think not, captain. In reality bugs are always a result of what you do. There are rare compiler bugs, but they are also often caused by stretching the limits of the language by using unneccessary complex programming style.

Programmers are egoistic people. They don't want to admit their own errors, but instead use excuses like "there will always be bugs". Programming languages like C have played a big role in this mess, because it lets you write poor quality code. However it's still you who suck, not the language.

When I look at some open source projects I can already tell why there are lots of bugs and developers spend huge amount of time trying to fix them. The problem is always how you could tell these people to learn better programming practices? It never works that way. It's always up to personal interest to learn more and try not to pretend like you know everything better which you don't if you produce large number of bugs.

Kaduria has four open bugs at the moment. Yes. Four, as in 4. I want to keep the number of bugs low, but also prevent them with strict programming rules. You can never rely on yourself as some kind of machine who never make mistakes, so it's important to follow rules that, if not always prevent, at least reduces errors. What those rules are depend on personal programming style and language, because some languages have features which almost always explain bugs.

I find it easier to become a better programmer, because then you spend far less time hunting those bugs you could have prevented. So keep this in mind: if your project has lots of bugs you suck.

1 comment:

  1. Hey Krice, thanks for the response. It's cool to hear other perspectives. I wrote up a blog post on bugs as well and I hope you check it out

    http://gameskraft.com/on-the-subject-of-bugs/

    ReplyDelete