On Saturday, 3 June 2017 at 07:51:55 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Saturday, 3 June 2017 at 06:55:35 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi
wrote:
The worst thing happened in programming in the last 30 years
is just that less and less programmers are adopting Walter
mindset...
Really?
On the contrary. What is being adopted is robustness and
program verification. More and more.
It doesn't seems to me that the trends to try to handle somehow,
that something, somewhere, who knows when, has gone wild it's
coherent with the term "robustness".
And the fact that the "nice tries" are done at runtime, in
production, is the opposite of what I'm thinking is program
verification.
Assuming that a program shouldn't be able to flush its buffers
out of some flawed reasoning about program correctness does not
support your argument at all.
Even if your program is fully based on event-sourcing and can
deal with an immediate shutdown YOU STILL WANT TO FLUSH YOUR
EVENT-BUFFERS TO DISK!
There's a fundamental difference between trying to flush logs and
trying to report what's happened, with the scope of gaining more
information of what happened, and trying to "automagically"
handle the fact that there's an error in the implementation, or
in the logic, or in the HW.
The argument Walter is follwing is flawed. If a failed assert
means you should not be able to flush to disk, then it also
means that you should undo everything the program has ever
written to disk.
The incorrect program state could have occured at install.
The argument Walter is following is not flawed: it's a really
beautiful pragmatic balance of risks and engineering way of
developing software, IMHO.
You have to reason about these things in probabilistic terms
and not in absolutes.
I'm trying to exactly do that, I like to think myself as a very
pragmatic person...
/Paolo
