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'Here Be Dragons': The Seven Most Vexing Problems In Programming (infoworld.com)
InfoWorld has identified "seven of the gnarliest corners of the programming world," which Slashdot reader snydeq describes as "worthy of large markers reading, 'Here be dragons.'" Some examples:
- Multithreading. "It sounded like a good idea," according to the article, but it just leads to a myriad of thread-managing tools, and "When they don't work, it's pure chaos. The data doesn't make sense. The columns don't add up. Money disappears from accounts with a poof. It's all bits in memory. And good luck trying to pin down any of it..."
- NP-complete problems. "Everyone runs with fear from these problems because they're the perfect example of one of the biggest bogeymen in Silicon Valley: algorithms that won't scale."
The other dangerous corners include closures, security, encryption, and identity management, as well as that moment "when the machine runs out of RAM." What else needs to be on a definitive list of the most dangerous "gotchas" in professional programming?
As far as I know, there are four hard problems in programming:
1. caching
2. naming (i.e. how do I name that variable/method/class)
3. off-by-one errors
Haha, you should be more Agile! It's not Agile to find out what your customers need first. Just throw a bunch of shit at the wall, make it flatter, and dump it into production to let your customers do your testing and chip away at the things they complain about.
They'll definitely give you useful feedback and not switch to another software product instead. If there's one thing that's always been true about customers, it's that they're fiercely loyal to their software vendors.
You should have modified the code to take those fractions of cents, and deposit them in your account.
> NP-complete problems. "Everyone runs with fear from these problems because they're the perfect example of one of the biggest bogeymen in Silicon Valley: algorithms that won't scale."
Customer: Why is this problem not scaling?
Programmer: It is NP-hard we are basically just brute forcing it.
Customer: If you can't solve this "NP-hard" problem, then I'll just find someone who will.
Programmer: Sure, let me know when that happens.
Re: Serious he missed the 2 biggest problems I've h
Arbitrary truncation of data...
Put everything in one huge massive universal class of doom. Kiss refactoring goodbye!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Dammit, 30 seconds after posting that I realized it was even better as... I got .99999999 problems, and a float ain't one......
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Freaking slashcode:
The problem is, people will write if (x * 3 < 1) ... then be mystified when it fails. My favorite is all the if (x < 0) ... bugs, failing to realize that negative zero is less than zero. Great fun.
Then there are the NaN-related bugs, which are the sort of math errors most people overlook - like dividing X and Y by N, which accidentally is 0, then later comparing them and discovering that they're equal.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.