Edward Welbourne <[email protected]> wrote: > On Monday, 23 April 2018 18:46:05 PDT Phil Bouchard wrote: >>>> Remember when Wordperfect kept crashing in Windows 3.1 for some strange >>>> reason back in the days? People ended up using MS Word. The same with >>>> Netscape... > > On 04/23/2018 10:34 PM, Thiago Macieira wrote: >>> There are a lot of reasons why people chose MS Word, not just crashes on >>> Wordperfect. Not to mention that Word crashes too. > > Phil Bouchard (24 April 2018 07:35) >> Well crashes don't help either. > > None the less, "1 crash makes your application worthless" grossly > exaggerates the severity of a crash. A crash that happens reliably on > start-up makes an application useless, to be sure, but I have often > learned to not do that one thing that triggers a crash in a piece of > software that I routinely find very useful (despite the fact that I have > to take care to not do that one thing). Meanwhile, many defects that > aren't crashes limit the value of software by significantly more - these > needn't even be bugs; simply not doing a thing that I find too useful to > do without, even if it's omitted for a Good Reason, is enough to make a > piece of software useless - at least in the presence of a competitor > which does the thing it doesn't. Speaking of which: > >> - There are minor rules you need to follow to make the code compile >> correctly, like nested structures aren't supported, etc. but you'll get >> the errors at compile-time thus when it runs then it cannot crash. > > That is not a minor rule. > That is a show-stoppper. > We're not about to give up nested structures ! > > I think you'll find there are *many* programmers who would sooner have a > few sporadic crashes than limit themselves to the programs they can > write without nested structures (either in their own code or in any > libraries their code is a client of). So the lack of that feature is a > prime example of a defect in software that's worse than a crash - your > users would sooner inflict sporadic crashes on their users than live > without this feature. Furthermore, the vast majority of users would > sooner have a program that sporadically crashes, as long as it's > tolerably rare, than have one with fewer features because it was written > by a programmer who was missing a language feature that would have made > it easier to do more with less. > > The reason why the software industry is a bit slap-dash about bugs is > that the market encourages shipping something that works adequately to > do something more useful, for the user, than the competition offers: > those who ship something useful (but a bit buggy) get large market share > before those who ship (less useful but) bug-free software even get their > products to market - which, in fact, they seldom do. I know one or two > programmers who, when they promise to deliver bug-free software, can > actually be trusted to do so (they'll also be charging highly for that; > and promising to, in the event of any bug, give back all the money and > fix the bug); but most programmers are *not capable* of that, for any > non-trivial program, and I doubt any software team of any size can be > confident of delivering entirely bug-free software. As it happens, > delivering engaging, useful software - that delivers value to its users > - tends to take a fairly large team (or take so long that the market has > been captured by someone else, who had a large team, before you ship). > > Eddy. >
I’m not sure if you read the link I posted about static analysis but a software bug can cause billion dollar projects like space shuttles to fail. Maybe MS Word was a bad example but they can be very costly. Also it is possible for me to support nested structures by prefixing class names so that their meta-data fits into the top-level namespace but for the moment they’re not. But those are personal preferences like not using underscores in function names, etc. _______________________________________________ Development mailing list [email protected] http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development
