Experiences/guidance on teaching Python as a first programming language
Steven D'Aprano
steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info
Tue Dec 17 10:24:25 EST 2013
On Tue, 17 Dec 2013 09:54:41 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:
> In article <mailman.4286.1387291924.18130.python-list at python.org>,
> Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
>
>> On 2013-12-17, Steven D'Aprano
>> <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> > I would really like to see good quality statistics about bugs per
>> > program written in different languages. I expect that, for all we
>> > like to make fun of COBOL, it probably has few bugs per
>> > unit-of-useful-work-done than the equivalent written in C.
>
> Well, there was that little Y2K thing...
Oh come on, how were people in the 1990s supposed to predict that they
would be followed by the year 2000???
That's a good point, but that wasn't a language issue, it was a program
design issue. Back in the 70s and 80s, when saving two digits per date
field seemed to be a sensible thing to do, people simply didn't imagine
that their programs would still be used in the year 1999[1]. That's not
the same sort of bug as (say) C buffer overflows, or SQL code injection
attacks. It's not like the COBOL language defined dates as having only
two digits.
[1] What gets me is that even in the year 1999, there were still
programmers writing code that assumed two-digit years. I have it on good
authority from somebody working as an external consultant for a bank in
1999 that he spent most of 1998 and 1999 fixing *brand new code* written
by the bank's own staff. You'd think that having lived through that
experience would have shaken his belief that private enterprise does
everything better, and the bigger the corporation the better they do it,
but apparently not. Go figure.
--
Steven
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