If he were selling ....

[Rolf]

Eelco, am I the only one who as a lay sees the flu in your signature quotation?

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first
place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you
are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
-- Brian W. Kernighan

If that were true it wouldnt mean a thing if you wrote good or bad code, but I am sure that someone who is able to write good code, he can also debug other codes with ease. Just like Chrilly came with something about Rybka beta. For him that wasnt rocket science.

Now please tell me what I have said as a lay. Good or bad lines?

[Eizenhammer]

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first
place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you
are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
-- Brian W. Kernighan

This is a joke, of course ...

Now please tell me what I have said as a lay. Good or bad lines?

...

[Eelco de Groot]

Hello Rolf,

I think you are going hopelessly off topic to the thread but what exactly do you mean with seeing the flu? Don't you mean fly? As in "a fly in the ointment'' or something like that? At least a fly is a bug, the flu however is a virus that is not quite the same thing, not even in computer terms We can debate about this but a virus is not really alive, so I would not call it a bug. The common cold, now that could be called a bug as that is caused by a bacterium. Is this some kind of German expression you translate to English? I have never heard it.

I don't know much about programming so this not really a question you should ask me. Maybe you could relate your question to what Albert Einstein wrote, something along the lines that if some hypothesis can not be tested, can not be proven false or true, there is no scientific value in it. It don't know if this is an exact interpretation of what Einstein meant or has said, as this is probably more a positivistic view, but in English Einstein's quote is reportedly:

"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." — Albert Einstein

Similary, nobody can ever prove of a complex program that it is totally bugfree, totally right, if not all the different states it can be in, are testable. Modern software is becoming more and more complex. Take an areoplane for instance like the Airbus 320. It is supposed to be extremely modern, which is equated to safe. I am sure you realize where I am going...

Something is only as safe as far as the conditions it has been tested under are the same as what it will encounter in reality. And the more complex a system becomes, the more difficult it is to test everything. There are standards for the maximum numbers of errors in software systems, I do not know exactly, but for an aeroplane I would suppose they would have the strictest standards possible in place, to make the chance of a fatal bug almost impossible. But 'Garbage in, garbage out' as the old computer saying goes, merely the fact that you can never predict all the possible inputs to a complex system, like the software for an aeroplane, means it can't be testable 100%. All you can do is make a complex system as transparent as possible and break it up in many small units, for which at least the behaviour and the number of states is manageable and simple enough to test, for a large number of possible conditions you can think it may encounter.

Like Einstein did for scientific theories, demand that they are falsifiable, you can do that for a program, forbidding any statements and codeblocks that are not falsifiable. But no amount of experimentation can ever prove positively, for an even moderately complex program, that it is correct 100% of the time, because the number of states that it can be in is, for many real world applications, an infinite number.

Eelco

[Rolf]

Hi Eelco, always a joy if you write something. My mistake was that I think in English and write what sounds right but is spelled differently. The word was flaw. BTW a flu is a fly.

As what you have written about Einstein I must add that all that came from Popper and not Einstein. Popper flew (sic) from Austria to England because of the Nazis. Another important figure from Austria was Feyerabend who advanced the methodology of Popper.

Let me please point out that such excursions into the world of science isnt totally oT here in the general part. If you seek clean computerchess then try the programming sub or the tournament sub for competition details. I wished that some more came from other fields here into CCC to fertilize the main activities here. If I should become mod this could be experienced in the next 6 months and then the value of interdisciplinary questions and theories might be evaluated again. IMO it could be a main reason for top VIP in computerchess to visit this place after a longer abstinence.