On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Andrew Moran wrote: > > Dave Tweed wrote: > > > If you discard `compliation preventing, very very quick to solve' bugs > > (e.g., missing semi-colons in C++, silly typecheck errors in Haskell) I > > find that the ratio between source code bugs and algorithm bugs is maybe > > 1:5. This means that whilst I find Haskell a great deal easier to write > > correctly than C++, there's not that much difference between debugging > > times for Haskell and C++ because the algorithm level bugs dominate. > > In my experience, the number of algorithm bugs is usually about the same, > regardless of which language you're using. And simple source code bugs are > no real problem in any language.
I think I was a bit unclear: I agree that no of algorithm bugs is essentially independent of programming language. What I was trying to say was that whilst there's much less debugging time on `non-trivial' source code bugs (by which I mean things like, say, having a nested if which doesn't work the way you think it does) is much less in Haskell, those are a relatively small proportion of the bugs. Consequently there's not a big disparity between the time I spend debugging Haskell and time spent debugging C++ because language independent bugs are the bottleneck. So in my case I couldn't justify using Haskell on the grounds of reduced debugging time. (I could justify it on lots of other grounds of course...) ___cheers,_dave_________________________________________________________ www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/ | `It's no good going home to practise email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | a Special Outdoor Song which Has To Be work tel:(0117) 954-5250 | Sung In The Snow' -- Winnie the Pooh _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
