Paddy wrote:
> A work colleague circulated this interesting article about reducing
> software bugs by orders of magnitude:
> http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/sep05/0905ext.html
>
> Some methods they talk about include removing error prone and ambiguous
> expressions from their ADA based language Sparc - The example they give
> is on why they removed the increment operators x++, x-- .
>
> A bit of googling shows that they have, in the past mentioned Python in
> Job specs, but only as one of many languages.
>
> I was wondering what Praxis thought of Python, and how good it would be
> if a Praxis engineer gave a critique of Python as a part of a flow for
> producing low bug-count software.
>
> In this sidebar to the main article:
>
> http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/sep05/0905extsb1.html
>
> It seems that they use one equation from the Z notation model and add
> it as a comment to their main programming languages function definition
> as a comment, then have a means of automatically testing the comment
> against the function body.
>
> This is rather like how doctest can check the test and expected result
> given in a doc-string against the implementation given in the function;
> indeed I wrote up such an example at work and circulated it amongst the
> resident perl mongers. - Gosh it fealt good :-)
>
> So, How do I get feedback from Praxis, Do they already read
> comp.lang.py?
>
> Cheers, Paddy.
>
As far as I can see the advantage of this kind of rigor is best kept for
the projects where it really matters (e.g. safety-critical monitoring
and control systems). Programming is a growing human activity, and I
would suggest that one of Python's designed-in advantages is the ease
with which comprehensible implementations of known algorithms can be
constructed. Given Guido's expressed interest in "Computer Programming
for Everyone" this comes as no surprise to more.
Nonetheless we have to remember that the vast majority of Python
programmers wouldn't care about differences between implementation
techniques, being happy that they've found *any* way to get the computer
to do what they want.
I'm sure that a Praxis evaluation of Python would make a very good
presentation at PyCon, whose Call for Proposals recently came out.
Yes folks, next time around it's PyCon TX 2006, see
http://www.python.org/pycon/2006/cfp
regards
Steve
--
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Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com
PyCon TX 2006 www.pycon.org
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