status of Programming by Contract (PEP 316)?

[Carl Banks]

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 22:18:09 -0300, Jorge Godoy wrote:

> Russ wrote:
> 
>> Alex, I think you are missing the point. Yes, I'm sure that web
>> searches are critical to
>> Google's mission and commercial success. But the point is that a few
>> subtle bugs cannot
>> destroy Google. If your search engines and associated systems have
>> bugs, you fix them
>> (or simply tolerate them) and continue on. And if a user does not get
>> the results he wants,
>> he isn't likely to die over it -- or even care much.
> 
> But if this pattern of not getting wanted results is common, then the
> user will migrate to alternative search engines and this will *kill* the
> business.  Wrong results won't impact ONE search, but many will impact
> the company business and will be part of the recipe to take it out of
> business.
> 
>> Online financial transactions are another matter altogether, of course.
>> User won't die, but
>> they will get very irate if they lose money. But I don't think that's
>> what you are talking about
>> here.
> 
> Lets make someone loose his job and have all his money commitments
> compromised because of this money lost and we might be talking about
> people taking their lives.
> 
> Again, this isn't 100% sure to happen, but it *can* happen.
> 
> As it happens with a peacemaker: the user won't die if his heart skips
> one beat, but start skipping a series of them and you're incurring in
> serious problems.
> 
> Just because the result isn't immediate it doesn't mean it isn't
> critical.

This is starting to sound silly, people.  Critical is a relative term, 
and one project's critical may be anothers mundane.  Sure a flaw in your 
flagship product is a critical problem *for your company*, but are you 
really trying to say that the criticalness of a bad web search is even 
comparable to the most important systems on airplanes, nuclear reactors, 
dams, and so on?  Come on.

BTW, I'm not really agreeing with Russ here.  His suggestion (that 
because Python is not used in highly critical systems, it is not suitable 
for them) is logically flawed.  And Alex's point, that Python has a good 
track record of reliabilty (look at Google's 99.9% uptime) is valid 
whether Google is a critical system or not.

So please leave the laughable comparisons between flight systems and web 
searches out of it.  It's unnecessary and makes Pythoners look bad.


Carl Banks

(P.S. 99.9% uptime would be a critical flaw in the systems I work on.)