connect four (game)

[nospam.Rustom Mody]

On Monday, November 27, 2017 at 9:08:42 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 1:55 PM, Michael Torrie  wrote:
> > On 11/26/2017 07:11 AM, bartc wrote:
> >>> You may argue that testing doesn't matter for his small game, written
> >>> for his own education and amusement.  The fact is that software in
> >>> general is of abysmal quality across the boards, and promoting a habit
> >>> of unit testing is good, even for trivial, home-grown stuff.
> >>
> >> I thought people were being hard on the OP.
> >
> > I wasn't being hard on the OP. My observation is about the state of
> > *all* software.  My software especially, your software, Microsoft's
> > software.  It all is of rather poor quality compared to the rigors of
> > other industries like civil engineering, manufacturing, etc.
>
> Not all software is poor quality compared to all examples of those
> industries. You'll find the equivalent of software bugs in a lot of
> hardware situations; the difference with software is that we have 100%
> perfect reproduction in the end-user products, so we call it a design
> flaw instead of a production artifact. (How often do you buy a box of
> something and find that a couple of them just break?) Even in
> large-scale civil engineering projects, there are plenty of
> stupidities. The house I'm living in has a place where the tiled floor
> doesn't quite align with the wall that it meets, and I can't figure
> out why; somewhere, two things that ought to have been parallel just
> aren't. Bridges have been known to crack, cars break down for no good
> reason, your hamburger just doesn't taste right today.
>
> Aviators have pinned down the best solution to this, I think. A pilot
> is not expected to be perfect; he is expected to follow checklists. A
> preflight checklist. A departure checklist. A landing checklist.
> Everything that needs to be done right is mentioned on the list, and
> you just go through the list and make sure you've done everything.

And thats where the analogy breaks down. Presumably a 50 person short-flight
and a 600-person transcontinental may have at least something in common in
their pilot-checklists What common will you find in a multi-million line OS, a
thousand line script and a student prime-numbers first-program?

No I am not dissing on testing and TDD; just that universalityâ1 of computing
devices
is something that our civilization is nowhere near understanding, leave alone
dealing with â ö two programs can be more far apart than a bullock cart and a
jet.
And yet they are both programs

â1 Ive seen CS PhDs ask a student why a student didnt incorporate some
error-checking
  into his compiler which amounted to solving the halting problem.
  More mundanely I see students have a hard time seeing their phones and their
  laptops as 'the same'