Error Code Quotes

There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.

I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' … The twenty-five percent is for error.

He knew what he was experiencing was a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.

All living organisms grow. But in nature there is a self-limiting logic to growth: organisms grow to a point of maturity, and then maintain a state of healthy equilibrium. When growth fails to stop – when cells keep replicating just for the sake of it – it’s because of a coding error, like what happens with cancer. This kind of growth quickly becomes deadly.

Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively.

How does she do it? She makes it sound like she is so cut up to be giving them this information, and it's all just bumph out of her head. She never told them ANYTHING. I don't think she's given them the right name of any airfield in Britain except Mainsend and Buscot, which of course were where she was stationed. They could have easily checked. It's all so close to truth, and so glib--her aircraft identification is rather good considering what a fuss she makes about it. It makes me think of the first day I met her, giving those directions in German. So cool and crisp, such authority--suddenly she really was a radio operator, a German radio operator, she was so good at faking it. Or when I told her to be Jamie, how she just suddenly turned into Jamie. This confession of hers is rotten with error...

In the short run, technology many be more efficient than man, but it will never be perfect. Every piece of equipment will eventually reveal an error code. In the long run, man will never be perfect, but prove to be more reliable than technology.

Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software-development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find.

Copy and paste is a design error

Error handling is important, but if it obscures logic, it’s wrong.

But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man.

Nature knows nothing of imperfection; imperfection is a human perception of nature. Inasmuch as we are part of nature we are also perfect; it is our humanity that is imperfect. And, ironically, because of our capacity for imperfection and error we are free beings—a freedom that no stone or animal can enjoy. Without the possibility of error and real indeterminacy implied by the quantum theory, human liberty is meaningless. The God that plays dice has set us free.

The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus had rendered him helpless. “Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message: ‘Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.’ I threw my laptop across the room.”  . . . If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the end to a communication revolution once hailed as a significant timesaver. A study of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased employees’ productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so many jokes to their spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)  . . . “This is one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer code we have ever encountered. We just can’t imagine what kind of devious mind would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on communications,” said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone out of concern that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him tied up for hours.

In 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the USA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), named Dr Sidney Gottlieb to direct the CIA's MKULTRA programme, which included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities, new memories, and responses to hypnotic access codes. In 1972, then-CIA director Richard Helms and Gottlieb ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records. A clerical error spared seven boxes, containing 1738 documents, over 17,000 pages. This archive was declassified through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1977, though the names of most people, universities, and hospitals are redacted. The CIA assigned each document a number preceded by "MORI", for "Managament of Officially Released Information", the CIA's automated electronic system at the time of document release. These documents, to be referenced throughout this chapter, are accessible on the Internet (see: abuse-of-power (dot) org/modules/content/index.php?id=31). The United States Senate held a hearing exposing the abuses of MKULTRA, entitled "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research into behavioral modification" (1977).

I like my code to be elegant and efficient. The logic should be straightforward to make it hard for bugs to hide, the dependencies minimal to ease maintenance, error handling complete according to an articulated strategy, and performance close to optimal so as not to tempt people to make the code messy with unprincipled optimizations. Clean code does one thing well. -Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++ and author of The C++ Programming Language

A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prisons. They too would be salted and put on trial. Breton historians have discovered that in 1784 in the town of Cornouaille, Maurice LeCorre had died in prison and was ordered salted for trial. But due to some bureaucratic error, the corpse did not get a trial date and was found by a prison guard more than seven years later, not only salted but fermented in beer, at which point it was buried without trial.

Thinking of yourself is boyish is one thing, but your friends assigned you a gender - without asking - and that flayed you. If I had to speculate, you're actually upset because you believe they should know you well enough to avoid such an error. Which isn't totally fair to you or them. Gender, sexuality, fluidity: Those areas require stumbling around in the dark, feeling, and bumping into things. But even if you can admit to that, you still feel out of control. And probably lonely.

The number of errors in code correlates strongly with the amount of code and the complexity of the code.

The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.

The recent recognition that the genetic code possesses a unique capacity to resist errors caused by mutation imparts the biochemical intelligent design argument with an entirely new level of credibility. Like a giant SOS shaped with letters ablaze, the optimal nature of the genetic code signals that an Intelligent Agent used those rules to start and sustain life.

Once a virus gets into an intensive poultry shed it can move quickly through the flock, constantly replicating itself. Any ‘errors’ or changes to the genetic code during replication don’t get repaired: this is how the virus mutates and new variant strains emerge. The tragedy is that while intensive farms provide ideal conditions for the emergence of new aggressive disease strains, wild birds can then become infected too. Experience

You may not like what I'm saying, but the cops and these people have a sort of code. So long as the rich and powerful don't go overboard, cops give them the slack that people who live in the barrios or Third Ward or the trailer parks don't get

(There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.”) Initially, it had been pretty easy. (“If you bother her again I will break every individual bone in your hand and arm. It will take about an hour.”) Then it had gotten more complicated as even the passengers who liked each other started to get into fights. I spent a lot of time (valuable time I could have been viewing/reading my saved entertainment media) arbitrating arguments I didn’t give a shit about.

Sam knew the foot was gone. He could see it was gone. He knew what he was experiencing was a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.

The goal is to minimize the amount of a program you have to think about at any one time. You might think of this as mental juggling—the more mental balls the program requires you to keep in the air at once, the more likely you'll drop one of the balls, leading to a design or coding error.

One of the paradoxes of defensive programming is that during development, you'd like an error to be noticeable—you'd rather have it be obnoxious than risk overlooking it. But during production, you'd rather have the error be as unobtrusive as possible, to have the program recover or fail gracefully.

there is any moral to this story, it’s that, when you are writing code, remember that someone may have to comb through it and check everything when it is being repurposed in the future. It could even be you, long after you have forgotten the original logic behind the code. For this reason, programmers can leave “comments” in their code, which are little messages to anyone else who has to read their code. The programmer mantra should be “Always comment on your code.” And make the comments helpful. I’ve reviewed dense code I wrote years before, to find the only comment is “Good luck, future Matt.

Some properties should not be changed. The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42, and you want it to stay that way. Error and status flags will often be hard-coded into your classes. Although they should be publicly and statically available, client code should not be able to change them.

[O]ne of the fatal errors of conceptual theology has been the separation of the acts of religious existence from the statements about it. Ideas of faith must not be studied in total separation from the moments of faith. If a plant is uprooted from its soil, removed from its native winds, sun-rays and terrestrial environment, and kept in a hothouse— will observations made of such a plant disclose its primordial nature? The growing inwardness of man that reaches and curves toward the light of God can hardly be transplanted into the shallowness of mere reflection. Torn out of its medium in human life, it wilts like a rose pressed between the pages of a book. Religion is, indeed, little more than a desiccated remnant of a once living reality when reduced to terms and definitions, to codes and catechisms. It can only be studied in its natural habitat of faith and piety, in a soul where the divine is within reach of all thoughts.

A body, he thought, was like a complex and complicated clock. Each one unique in its parts. Through study, one might discover the tricks of its mechanisms. Through trial and error, one might calibrate one’s touches on the gears and learn to make the clock tick. He drew his knuckles down her nape, along her spine. She shuddered

When the genetic code was solved, in the early 1960s, it turned out to be full of redundancy. Much of the mapping from nucleotides to amino acids seemed arbitrary—not as neatly patterned as any of Gamow’s proposals. Some amino acids correspond to just one codon, others to two, four, or six. Particles called ribosomes ratchet along the RNA strand and translate it, three bases at a time. Some codons are redundant; some actually serve as start signals and stop signals. The redundancy serves exactly the purpose that an information theorist would expect. It provides tolerance for errors. Noise affects biological messages like any other. Errors in DNA—misprints—are mutations.

The chief care of the legislators [in the colonies of New England] was the maintenance of orderly conduct and good morals in the community: thus they constantly invaded the domain of conscience, and there was scarcely a sin which was no subject to magisterial censure. The reader is aware of the rigor with which these laws punished rape and adultery; intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise severely repressed. The judge was empowered to inflict either a pecuniary penalty, a whipping, or marriage, on the misdemeanants; and if the records of the old courts of New Haven may be believed, prosecutions of this kind were not unfrequent. We find a sentence, bearing date the 1st of May, 1660, inflicting a fine and reprimand on a young woman who was accused of using improper language, and of allowing herself to be kissed. The Code of 1650 abounds in preventive measures. It punishes idleness and drunkenness with severity. Innkeepers were forbidden to furnish more than certain quantities of liquor to each customer; and simple lying, whenever it may be injurious, is checked by a fine or a flogging. In other places, the legislator, entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration which he had himself demanded in Europe, makes attendance on divine service compulsory, and goes so far as to visit with severe punishment, and even with death, Christians who choose to worship God according to a ritual differing from his own. Sometimes, indeed, the zeal for regulation induces him to descend to the most frivolous particulars: thus a law is to be found in the same code which prohibits the use of tobacco. It must not be forgotten that these fantastical and vexatious laws were not imposed by authority, but that they were freely voted by all the persons interested in them, and that the manners of the community were even more austere and puritanical than the laws.... These errors are no doubt discreditable to human reason; they attest the inferiority of our nature, which is incapable of laying firm hold upon what is true and just, and is often reduced to the alternative of two excesses. In strict connection with this penal legislation, which bears such striking marks of a narrow, sectarian spirit, and of those religious passions which had been warmed by persecution and were still fermenting among the people, a body of political laws is to be found, which, though written two hundred years ago, is still in advance of the liberties of our own age.

Illness is temporary,” he explains. “Injuries borrow our blood, infections use our cells, but our illnesses are different. In a way, they’re self-inflicted. An error in the code. This kind—well—it owns us, it hurts us, because it just doesn’t understand.” Language is flawed. That’s what he means. We don’t have diseases. They have us. They found a home in us.

In all cases, life had already ceased for the patient. In fact, life had ceased before the code started. That was the time when the patient had stopped breathing or the heart had stopped beating. That was when the patient had really died. Yet we officially record the time of death as the moment when we adjourn our battle, not the moment the cells have adjourned theirs.

It’s worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech codes, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. It is not for nothing that we all have the picture of the schoolmarm rapping a child across the knuckles for some grammatical error as one of our primordial images of oppression. But at the same time, if there were no shared conventions of any kind—no semantics, syntax, phonemics—we’d all just be babbling incoherently and wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other at all. Obviously in such circumstances none of us would be free to do much of anything. So at some point along the way, rules-as-constraining pass over into rules-as-enabling, even if it’s impossible to say exactly where. Freedom, then, really is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating. And this is what linguists always observe. There is no language without grammar. But there is also no language in which everything, including grammar, is not constantly changing all the time.

In a strange way, death is actually one of the steps of the code. It isn't listed in the algorithm, of course, but it's there. The first step. Everyone knows it, but no one will say it. Even though the patient has already died from the devastation of disease, the code presses on until someone "calls it." Then, and only then, can death be acknowledged. It is a wrenching combination of human grief and quotidian bureaucracy.

The idea . . . that Christianity brought a new ethical code into the world is a grave error. If it had done so, then we would have to conclude that all who first preached it wholly misunderstood their own message: for all of them, its founder, His precursor, His apostles, came demanding repentance and offering forgiveness, a demand and an offer both meaningless except on the assumption of a moral law already known and already broken.

Meanwhile, the original programmers will have left, and their replacements -- believing they understand the code -- will make some truly spectacular errors, mistakes that will suddenly make everything completely stop working for a while. So that what had seemed to be a descending curve of bugs, a fall toward the ever-receding zero, will reveal itself as the shape of another equation altogether: a line of relentlessly rising, bug-counts climbing in an endless battle against infinity.

I have also a feeling that despite my deepest respect for the life and work of Jawaharlal Nehru, it was a grave error to codify Hindu laws instead of having a uniform civil code. If we have one criminal law for all the citizens of the Republic of India and one law in respect of Income Tax, transfer of property etc.., there is no reason to have separate codes for the Hindus and the Muslims,. All these distortions are the products of our not being able to think clearly about our past, present and future

Code should be obvious: When someone needs to make a change, they should be able to find the code to be changed easily and to make the change quickly without introducing any errors. A healthy code base maximizes our productivity, allowing us to build more features for our users both faster and more cheaply. To keep code healthy, pay attention to what is getting between the programming team and that ideal, then refactor to get closer to the ideal. But the most important thing to learn from this example is the rhythm of refactoring. Whenever I’ve shown people how I refactor, they are surprised by how small my steps are, each step leaving the code in a working state that compiles and passes its tests. I was just as surprised myself when Kent Beck showed me how to do this in a hotel room in Detroit two decades ago. The key to effective refactoring is recognizing that you go faster when you take tiny steps, the code is never broken, and you can compose those small steps into substantial changes. Remember that—and the rest is silence.

Beauty wasn’t the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good. In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

The sixty-story John Hancock Tower was built in Boston in the 1970s, and it was discovered to have an unexpected torsional instability. The interplay of the wind between the surrounding buildings and the tower itself was causing it to twist. Despite being designed in line with current building codes, torsional instability found a way to twist the building, and people on the top floors started feeling seasick. Once again, it was tuned mass dampers to the rescue! Lumps of lead weighing 330 tons were put in vats of oil on opposite ends of the fifty-eighth floor. Attached to the building by springs, the lead weights damp any twisting motion and keep the movement below noticeable levels.

Inheritance has recently fallen out of favor as a programming design solution in many programming languages because it’s often at risk of sharing more code than necessary. Subclasses shouldn’t always share all characteristics of their parent class but will do so with inheritance. This can make a program’s design less flexible. It also introduces the possibility of calling methods on subclasses that don’t make sense or that cause errors because the methods don’t apply to the subclass. In addition, some languages will only allow a subclass to inherit from one class, further restricting the flexibility of a program’s design. For these reasons, Rust takes a different approach, using trait objects instead of inheritance.

In one of his numerous prefaces he says, “I have always been on the side of the Puritans in the matter of Art”; and a closer study will, I think, reveal that he is on the side of the Puritans in almost everything. Puritanism was not a mere code of cruel regulations, though some of its regulations were more cruel than any that have disgraced Europe. Nor was Puritanism a mere nightmare, an evil shadow of eastern gloom and fatalism, though this element did enter it, and was as it were the symptom and punishment of its essential error. Something much nobler (even if almost equally mistaken) was the original energy in the Puritan creed. And it must be defined with a little more delicacy if we are really to understand the attitude of G. B. S., who is the greatest of the modern Puritans and perhaps the last.

The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going offline. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code.

For example, say you're an average web developer. You're familiar with a dozen programming languages, tons of helpful libraries, standards, protocols, what have you. You still have to learn more at the rate of about one a week, and remember to check the hundreds of things you know to see if they've been updated or broken and make sure they all still work together and that nobody fixed the bug in one of them that you exploited to do something you thought was really clever one weekend when you were drunk. You're all up to date, so that's cool, then everything breaks. "Double you tee eff?" you say, and start hunting for the problem. You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for "Infinity" when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn't, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler. Then he decided he wasn't going to tell anyone that this was an error, because he's a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can't even find the cat.

On the other hand, some of the family’s impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you’ve made an error; with the post office, you have to wait. Haven’t we all at some point tested its humanity? I send mail to friends in Upper Molar, New York (they live in Upper Nyack), and expect a stranger to laugh and deliver it in forty-eight hours. More often than not, the stranger does. With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way. You may have to wait for hours in a dimly lit corridor. The staff may be short-tempered and dilatory. But eventually you will get treated. In the Central Post Office’s Nixie unit—where mail arrives that has been illegibly or incorrectly addressed—I see street numbers in the seventy thousands; impossible pairings of zip codes and streets; addresses without a name, without a street, without a city; addresses that consist of the description of a building; addresses written in water-based ink that rain has blurred. Skilled Nixie clerks study the orphans one at a time. Either they find a home for them or they apply that most expressive of postal markings, the vermilion finger of accusation that lays the blame squarely on you, the sender.

Neo-Darwinism and Mutations In order to find a solution, Darwinists advanced the "Modern Synthetic Theory," or as it is more commonly known, Neo-Darwinism, at the end of the 1930s. Neo- Darwinism added mutations, which are distortions formed in the genes of living beings due to such external factors as radiation or replication errors, as the "cause of favorable variations" in addition to natural mutation. Today, the model that stands for evolution in the world is Neo-Darwinism. The theory maintains that millions of living beings formed as a result of a process whereby numerous complex organs of these organisms (e.g., ears, eyes, lungs, and wings) underwent "mutations," that is, genetic disorders. Yet, there is an outright scientific fact that totally undermines this theory: Mutations do not cause living beings to develop; on the contrary, they are always harmful. The reason for this is very simple: DNA has a very complex structure, and random effects can only harm it. The American geneticist B. G. Ranganathan explains this as follows: First, genuine mutations are very rare in nature. Secondly, most mutations are harmful since they are random, rather than orderly changes in the structure of genes; any random change in a highly ordered system will be for the worse, not for the better. For example, if an earthquake were to shake a highly ordered structure such as a building, there would be a random change in the framework of the building which, in all probability, would not be an improvement. Not surprisingly, no mutation example, which is useful, that is, which is observed to develop the genetic code, has been observed so far. All mutations have proved to be harmful. It was understood that mutation, which is presented as an "evolutionary mechanism," is actually a genetic occurrence that harms living things, and leaves them disabled. (The most common effect of mutation on human beings is cancer.) Of course, a destructive mechanism cannot be an "evolutionary mechanism." Natural selection, on the other hand, "can do nothing by itself," as Darwin also accepted. This fact shows us that there is no "evolutionary mechanism" in nature. Since no evolutionary mechanism exists, no such any imaginary process called "evolution" could have taken place.

The picture of the software designer deriving his design in a rational, error-free way from a statement of requirements is quite unrealistic. No system has ever been developed in that way, and probably none ever will. Even the small program developments shown in textbooks and papers are unreal. They have been revised and polished until the author has shown us what he wishes he had done, not what actually did happen. — David Parnas Paul Clements

Don't use a boolean variable as a status variable. Use an enumerated type instead. It's common to add a new state to a status variable, and adding a new type to an enumerated type requires a mere recompilation rather than a major revision of every line of code that checks the variable. Use access routines rather than checking the variable directly. By checking the access routine rather than the variable, you allow for the possibility of more sophisticated state detection. For example, if you wanted to check combinations of an error-state variable and a current-function-state variable, it would be easy to do if the test were hidden in a routine and hard to do if it were a complicated test hard-coded throughout the program.

Error processing is turning out to be one of the thorniest problems of modern computer science, and you can't afford to deal with it haphazardly. Some people have estimated that as much as 90 percent of a program's code is written for exceptional, error-processing cases or housekeeping, implying that only 10 percent is written for nominal cases (Shaw in Bentley 1982). With so much code dedicated to handling errors, a strategy for handling them consistently should be spelled out in the architecture.

An assertion is a sanity check to make sure your code isn’t doing something obviously wrong. These sanity checks are performed by assert statements. If the sanity check fails, then an AssertionError exception is raised.

Here are the benefits you can expect from using this style of pseudocode: Pseudocode makes reviews easier. You can review detailed designs without examining source code. Pseudocode makes low-level design reviews easier and reduces the need to review the code itself. Pseudocode supports the idea of iterative refinement. You start with a high-level design, refine the design to pseudocode, and then refine the pseudocode to source code. This successive refinement in small steps allows you to check your design as you drive it to lower levels of detail. The result is that you catch high-level errors at the highest level, mid-level errors at the middle level, and low-level errors at the lowest level—before any of them becomes a problem or contaminates work at more detailed levels. Pseudocode makes changes easier. A few lines of pseudocode are easier to change than a page of code. Would you rather change a line on a blueprint or rip out a wall and nail in the two-by-fours somewhere else? The effects aren't as physically dramatic in software, but the principle of changing the product when it's most malleable is the same. One of the keys to the success of a project is to catch errors at the "least-value stage," the stage at which the least effort has been invested. Much less has been invested at the pseudocode stage than after full coding, testing, and debugging, so it makes economic sense to catch the errors early.

Return an error code. You could decide that only certain parts of a system will handle errors. Other parts will not handle errors locally; they will simply report that an error has been detected and trust that some other routine higher up in the calling hierarchy will handle the error. The specific mechanism for notifying the rest of the system that an error has occurred could be any of the following: Set the value of a status variable Return status as the function's return value Throw an exception by using the language's built-in exception mechanism

Isolate complexity. Complexity in all forms—complicated algorithms, large data sets, intricate communications protocols, and so on—is prone to errors. If an error does occur, it will be easier to find if it isn't spread through the code but is localized within a class. Changes arising from fixing the error won't affect other code because only one class will have to be fixed—other code won't be touched. If you find a better, simpler, or more reliable algorithm, it will be easier to replace the old algorithm if it has been isolated into a class. During development, it will be easier to try several designs and keep the one that works best.

Avoid duplicate code. Undoubtedly the most popular reason for creating a routine is to avoid duplicate code. Indeed, creation of similar code in two routines implies an error in decomposition. Pull the duplicate code from both routines, put a generic version of the common code into a base class, and then move the two specialized routines into subclasses.

Containment is the simple idea that a class contains a primitive data element or object. A lot more is written about inheritance than about containment, but that's because inheritance is more tricky and error-prone, not because it's better. Containment is the work-horse technique in object-oriented programming.

Call an error-processing routine/object. Another approach is to centralize error handling in a global error-handling routine or error-handling object. The advantage of this approach is that error-processing responsibility can be centralized, which can make debugging easier. The tradeoff is that the whole program will know about this central capability and will be coupled to it. If you ever want to reuse any of the code from the system in another system, you'll have to drag the error-handling machinery along with the code you reuse.

In plain English, an assert statement says, “I assert that this condition holds true, and if not, there is a bug somewhere in the program.” Unlike exceptions, your code should not handle assert statements with try and except; if an assert fails, your program should crash. By failing fast like this, you shorten the time between the original cause of the bug and when you first notice the bug. This will reduce the amount of code you will have to check before finding the code that’s causing the bug. Assertions are for programmer errors, not user errors. For errors that can be recovered from (such as a file not being found or the user entering invalid data), raise an exception instead of detecting it with an assert statement.

Use locking to control access to global variables. Similar to concurrency control in a multiuser database environment, locking requires that before the value of a global variable can be used or updated, the variable must be "checked out." After the variable is used, it's checked back in. During the time it's in use (checked out), if some other part of the program tries to check it out, the lock/unlock routine displays an error message or fires an assertion.

And of course you learn from the errors of others. You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.

However, it is recommended that an exception only be caught if something meaningful can be done at that point in the code. This could be as simple as rolling back a database transaction or as complex as showing users a fancy user interface for them to view the error details and to report the error to the developers. It is also often inadvisable to catch an exception and silently do nothing, or catch the general Exception base type. Both of these two scenarios together are even more discouraged. With the latter scenario, you end up attempting to catch and respond to everything, including exceptions that you realistically have no meaningful way of recovering from, like OutOfMemoryException, Stack­ OverflowException, or ThreadAbortException

According to a study by Carnegie Mellon University, commercial software typically has twenty to thirty bugs for every thousand lines of code—fifty million lines of code means 1 million to 1.5 million potential errors to be exploited. This is the basis for all malware attacks that take advantage of these computer bugs to get the code to do something it was not originally intended to do. As computer code grows more elaborate, software bugs flourish and security suffers, with increasing consequences for society at large.

Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours—often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time. Disturbingly often, premature local optimization actually hinders global optimization (and hence reduces overall performance). A prematurely optimized portion of a design frequently interferes with changes that would have much higher payoffs across the whole design, so you end up with both inferior performance and excessively complex code.

If your code is adaptive, you will be able to make changes to it more quickly, more easily, and with fewer errors than you would if you were working with a codebase that impedes changes.

Use manual sanity checks in data pipelines. When optimizing data processing systems, it’s easy to stay in the “binary mindset” mode, using tight pipelines, efficient binary data formats, and compressed I/O. As the data passes through the system unseen, unchecked (except for perhaps its type), it remains invisible until something outright blows up. Then debugging commences. I advocate sprinkling a few simple log messages throughout the code, showing what the data looks like at various internal points of processing, as good practice — nothing fancy, just an analogy to the Unix head command, picking and visualizing a few data points. Not only does this help during the aforementioned debugging, but seeing the data in a human-readable format leads to “aha!” moments surprisingly often, even when all seems to be going well. Strange tokenization! They promised input would always be encoded in latin1! How did a document in this language get in there? Image files leaked into a pipeline that expects and parses text files! These are often insights that go way beyond those offered by automatic type checking or a fixed unit test, hinting at issues beyond component boundaries. Real-world data is messy. Catch early even things that wouldn’t necessarily lead to exceptions or glaring errors. Err on the side of too much verbosity.

Software defects manifest themselves in a variety of ways, from misunderstood requirements to coding errors.

Programs written in dynamically typed languages require large suites of tests to give some assurance that simple type errors cannot occur.

Even the best human software has about one error for every ten thousand lines of code, and most have many more than that.

Using JavaScript Error objects to reject promises can capture the call stack for troubleshooting

Es todo un clásico el libro de Martin Fowler titulado ‹‹Refactoring: improving the design of existing code››; este libro me ha ayudado como ningún otro a mejorar en la calidad del código que escribo y debería estar en la estantería de cualquier programador profesional. El

many shipwrecks and engineering disasters were blamed on faulty tables. These mathematical tables were calculated by hand, and the mistakes were simply the result of human error. This caused Babbage to exclaim, “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!” This marked the beginning of an extraordinary endeavor to build a machine capable of faultlessly calculating the tables to a high degree of accuracy. In 1823 Babbage designed “Difference Engine No. 1,” a magnificent calculator consisting of 25,000 precision parts, to be built with government funding. Although Babbage was a brilliant innovator, he was not a great implementer. After ten years of toil, he abandoned “Difference Engine No.

Systems Test No parts of the schedule are so thoroughly affected by sequential constraints as component debugging and system test. Furthermore, the time required depends on the number and subtlety of the errors encountered. Theoretically this number should be zero. Because of optimism, we usually expect the number of bugs to be smaller than it turns out to be. Therefore testing is usually the most mis-scheduled part of programming. For some years I have been successfully using the following rule of thumb for scheduling a software task: l /3 planning l/6 coding l/4 component test and early system test l/4 system test, all components in hand.

The most challenging part of programming is conceptualizing the problem, and many errors in programming are conceptual errors. Because

Encapsulation is broken because all functions in the path of a throw must know about details of that low-level exception. Given that the purpose of exceptions is to allow you to handle errors at a distance, it is a shame that checked exceptions break encapsulation in this way.

Thoughtful design, code review, pair programming, and a considered test strategy (including TDD practices and fully automated unit test suites) are all of the utmost importance. Techniques like assertions, defensive programming, and code coverage tools will all help minimise the likelihood of errors sneaking past.  We all know these mantras. Don’t we?

In other words, Brazilian soccer is different from the rest of the world's because Brazil employs the sporting equivalent of a Link trainer. Futsal compresses soccer's essential skills into a small box; it places players inside the deep practice zone, making and correcting errors, constantly generating solutions to vivid problems.

All bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors: That man has two real existing principles: a body & a soul. That energy, called evil, is alone from the body: & that reason, called good, is alone from the soul. That God will torment man in eternity for following his energies. But the following contraries to these are true: Man has no body distinct from his soul; for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age. Energy is the only life, and is from the body; and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy. Energy is eternal delight. WILLIAM BLAKE

Let’s make no mistake about this: 418 is an error! Originally an April Fool’s joke, 418 (four eighteen) is a response code given when a request to brew coffee is made to a web service that actually happens to be a teapot. As we all know, teapots can’t make coffee, to ask a teapot to do the impossible is an error.

(There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.”)

Now I created a module from whole cloth. It was concise, not even a hundred lines of code, built in perfect symmetry around a single action. One by one, in exactly the right order, I suspended the arm’s motor control loops. Then I loaded the action directly into the PKD 2891 Stepper Motors, which most people didn’t realize you could do; they all had their own MCUs, with just enough memory for what came next. Then, one by one, I brought the motor control loops back online. I finished my new module, named it, tried to compile, was informed of several embarrassing syntax errors, corrected them, compiled again. I flashed the Vitruvian with the new code and said aloud, “Try again.” It plucked up an egg, moved it lightly into position, paused, and thwacked the egg against the rim of the bowl. Just after the thwack, my new module took over. The motor control loops went dark. The arm wasn’t running blind; it was more like … a blink. Not even a hundred milliseconds, during which my new module said: Just go for it. In the ArmOS codebase, as part of the Control package, I had created something new—a tiny space without feedback or self-awareness—and I had named it Confidence. The yolk flowed out with the albumen while the shell came apart cleanly in the Vitruvian’s six-fingered grip. The arm swiveled and dropped the shell neatly into the small bowl I had set up for that purpose—the bowl that had never before this moment actually been needed. I had solved the egg problem, and I had done so in the simplest way possible: not by adding code, but by taking it away. During the blink, the Vitruvian was no longer caught in a wash of continuous feedback. It was no longer second-guessing its second guesses a thousand times every second.

The twelve-factor developer resists the urge to use different backing services between development and production, even when adapters theoretically abstract away any differences in backing services. Differences between backing services mean that tiny incompatibilities crop up, causing code that worked and passed tests in development or staging to fail in production. These types of errors create friction that disincentivizes continuous deployment. The cost of this friction and the subsequent dampening of continuous deployment is extremely high when considered in aggregate over the lifetime of an application.

Heirs of Herodotus by D. Kilmer. Excerpt from Chapter 9. Good leaders attempt to learn from their mistakes. They have the courage to acknowledge the consequences of prior decisions, no matter how terrible, so that errors will not be repeated. But in doing so, good leaders risk discarding even excellent ideas—simply because they failed, previously, to deliver the desired results. Great leaders, on the other hand, recognize that all outcomes—bad and good—are but noisy signals of the wisdom of their approach. Chance, error, and unknowns also play a role. While good leaders exhibit the strength to learn from bad outcomes, great leaders show the wisdom not to overweight outcomes, whether they be bad or good. Ultimately, outcomes are not what matter. Inputs matter—because only inputs can be chosen. If your decision process was sound, if the strategy was wise ex ante, if you can find no fault in your approach despite extensive examination, then it is misguided to second-guess your actions simply because the outcome was rotten.

How to provide awesome technical support Most back and forth happens because customers fail to explain their problem, or the support rep fails to understand the issue. Ask these questions: What is the error? What are the steps to reproduce the error? What are the desired results? Your software should have a public and a private facing log. The log should detail successful syncs and sync failures. Users should have an option to receive the log by email and view it on your website. In our log, we have code that checks for error messages. If the message contains a phrase, then a help article appears next to the error. This article is not only good for end-users but also for your support staff. Your employees can better understand the error and follow the standard operating procedures to resolve it. This system reduced our support costs by half.

What is Sapiens (The Sonnet) Soil can survive without sapiens, But there is no sapiens without soil. There is no us if nature goes off the rocker, Yet way more than nature, we value gas and oil. We started off using clothes as cover for privacy, And we ended up prioritizing clothes over integrity. Instead of loving people and using the products, We ended up loving products and abusing humanity. Sapiens is supposed to mean wise and aware, But in practice, sapiens is code for shallow. Sapiens has become just a synonym for show-off. Neither wise, nor aware, sapiens just means narrow. However, no error is ultimate if we're willing for reform. An expanding heart is the antidote to all narrow norm.

One of the big challenges in studying aging is this: Aging isn’t a disease that has an end point. Ultimately, death is the end point, but aging is really a cluster of diseases, processes, conditions, and system errors that result in loss of years and loss of quality of life.

The more ambitious the OKR, the greater the risk of overlooking a vital criterion. To safeguard quality while pushing for quantitative deliverables, one solution is to pair key results, to measure both effect and counter effect, as Grove wrote in High Output Management. When key results focus on output, Grove noted, 'the paired counterparts should stress the quality of work, thus in Accounts Payable, the number of vouchers processed should be paired with the number of errors found either by auditing or by our suppliers. For another example, the number of square feet cleaned by a custodial group should be paired with by rating of the quality of work as assessed by a senior manager with an office in that building.' -- Let the quantity goal be three new features, the paired quality goal will be fewer than 5 bugs per feature in quality assurance testing. The result - developers will write cleaner code. If the quantity goal is 50 million dollars in Q1 sales, the quality goal can be 10 million dollars in maintenance contracts, because sustained retention by sales professionals will increase customer success and satisfaction.

It’s my name on the company, Malik.” With his free hand, he points to his chest. “I don’t allow gross errors on my projects. Not in judgment, not in code compliance, never in materials.

Early Exposure (error code 3627), in which the subject encounters one of our Agents earlier in life and thus finds him- or herself unable, at the moment of final Consummation, to experience the potent mixture of shock, desire, terror, and awe necessary for catharsis and closure.

The fact of zero He added nonstop: Did you know that zero was not used throughout human history! Until 781 A.D, when it was first embodied and used in arithmetic equations by the Arab scholar Al-Khwarizmi, the founder of algebra. Algorithms took their name from him, and they are algorithmic arithmetic equations that you have to follow as they are and you will inevitably get the result, the inevitable result. And before that, across tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, humans refused to deal with zero. While the first reference to it was in the Sumerian civilization, where inscriptions were found three thousand years ago in Iraq, in which the Sumerians indicated the existence of something before the one, they refused to deal with it, define it and give it any value or effect, they refused to consider it a number. All these civilizations, some of which we are still unable to decipher many of their codes, such as the Pharaonic civilization that refused to deal with zero! We see them as smart enough to build the pyramids with their miraculous geometry and to calculate the orbits of stars and planets with extreme accuracy, but they are very stupid for not defining zero in a way that they can deal with, and use it in arithmetic operations, how strange this really is! But in fact, they did not ignore it, but gave it its true value, and refused to build their civilizations on an unknown and unknown illusion, and on a wrong arithmetical frame of reference. Throughout their history, humans have looked at zero as the unknown, they refused to define it and include it in their calculations and equations, not because it has no effect, but because its true effect is unknown, and remaining unknown is better than giving it a false effect. Like the wrong frame of reference, if you rely on it, you will inevitably get a wrong result, and you will fall into the inevitability of error, and if you ignore it, your chance of getting it right remains. Throughout their history, humans have preferred to ignore zero, not knowing its true impact, while we simply decided to deal with it, and even rely on it. Today we build all our ideas, our civilization, our software, mathematics, physics, everything, on the basis that 1 + 0 equals one, because we need to find the effect of zero so that our equations succeed, and our lives succeed with, but what if 1 + 0 equals infinity?! Why did we ignore the zero in summation, and did not ignore it in multiplication?! 1×0 equals zero, why not one? What is the reason? He answered himself: There is no inevitable reason, we are not forced. Humans have lived throughout their ages without zero, and it did not mean anything to them. Even when we were unable to devise any result that fits our theorems for the quotient of one by zero, then we admitted and said unknown, and ignored it, but we ignored the logic that a thousand pieces of evidence may not prove me right, and one proof that proves me wrong. Not doing our math tables in the case of division, blowing them up completely, and with that, we decided to go ahead and built everything on that foundation. We have separated the arithmetic tables in detail at our will, to fit our calculations, and somehow separate the whole universe around us to fit these tables, despite their obvious flaws. And if we decide that the result of one multiplied by zero is one instead of zero, and we reconstruct the whole world on this basis, what will happen? He answered himself: Nothing, we will also succeed, the world, our software, our thoughts, our dealings, and everything around us will be reset according to the new arithmetic tables. After a few hundred years, humans will no longer be able to understand that one multiplied by zero equals zero, but that it must be one because everything is built on this basis.

On the eve of the hearing, in the fall of 2017, reporters reviewed the prepared testimony of Facebook legal counsel Colin Stretch and his counterparts at Twitter and Google. Twitter had acknowledged finding 131,000 Russian tweets. Google had disclosed that “more than 1,000” Russian videos had been uploaded. For its part, Facebook was coming to the table with a number in the nine figures. The comparison wasn’t apples to oranges so much as an apple to a school bus. As a portion of the trillions of total content views over the course of the 2016 election, it was trivial—a rounding error—but it sure sounded like a lot: “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone,” a New York Times headline blared. —

I was here all those years,” he said, “within your reach, inside your own realm, watching your struggle, your loneliness, your longing, watching you in a battle you thought you were fighting for me, a battle in which you were supporting my enemies and taking an endless defeat—I was here, hidden by nothing but an error of your sight, as Atlantis is hidden from men by nothing but an optical illusion—I was here, waiting for the day when you would see, when you would know that by the code of the world you were supporting, it’s to the darkest bottom of the underground that all the things you valued would have to be consigned and that it’s there that you would have to look. I was here. I was waiting for you. I love you, Dagny. I love you more than my life, I who have taught men how life is to be loved. I’ve taught them also never to expect the unpaid for—and what I did tonight, I did it with full knowledge that I would pay for it and that my life might have to be the price.

Illness is temporary,” he explains. “Injuries borrow our blood, infections use our cells, but our illnesses are different. In a way, they’re self-inflicted. An error in the code. This kind—well—it owns us, it hurts us, because it just doesn’t understand.” Language is flawed. That’s what he means. We don’t have diseases.

Naturally, there is no need to quarrel with those who take a commonsense approach to such matters, those for whom Mozart’s temporary adoption of the name Adam is merely a mistake or a trivial jest, another example of his penchant for mystification, which often took such literary forms as wordplay, ciphers, codes, and riddles.9 But they ought in turn to be tolerant of those who want to speculate about the implications of such things in the belief that there is often a serious substratum to such “errors” and to the comic in general, and that deeper motives may also have been at work here.

Here are the most important software design principles discussed in this book: Complexity is incremental: you have to sweat the small stuff (see p. 11). Working code isn’t enough (see p. 14). Make continual small investments to improve system design (see p. 15). Modules should be deep (see p. 23) Interfaces should be designed to make the most common usage as simple as possible (see p. 27). It’s more important for a module to have a simple interface than a simple implementation (see pp. 61, 74). General-purpose modules are deeper (see p. 39). Separate general-purpose and special-purpose code (see pp. 45, 68). Different layers should have different abstractions (see p. 51). Pull complexity downward (see p. 61). Define errors out of existence (see p. 81). Design it twice (see p. 91). Comments should describe things that are not obvious from the code (see p. 101). Software should be designed for ease of reading, not ease of writing (see p. 151). The increments of software development should be abstractions, not features (see p. 156). Separate what matters from what doesn’t matter and emphasize the things that matter (see p. 171

KANAT-ALEXANDER: "Code Simplicity

I sit stunned, nerveless, amid the ruins Of my fallen idols. The iconoclast Philosophy Has shattered for me My God . . . But through the confusing ruins, Faith, still hoping, Somehow raises her hands and bids me— Yearn on! Finally Through the mazes of error and doubt and mistrust You will come, weary heart To the final conclusion upon which you will build anew.

It seemed a terrible blind spot that we did not discuss the toll those errors exacted on us. Medicine is not oriented to recognize trauma in its own. We do not debrief our team or even ourselves after a code. We do not pause and assess the emotional well-being of our colleagues after they lose a patient, the way we pause to assess the root cause of errors. We were trained to leave the thin veneer covering our colleagues’ emotions undisturbed. We have utterly no idea what to do with shame. We have built no confessionals.

On the one hand, Vacca was enthusiastic that New York was at the forefront of using data to improve the delivery of city services. But he was also deeply troubled that those on the receiving end of these decisions were not even aware of how they were being made or how they might challenge them if they seemed wrong. Vacca proposed legislation to mandate that city agencies publish the source code of all algorithms and allow members of the public to self-test them by submitting their own data and getting the results. During a committee hearing in 2017, he framed his bill as a key to democracy in the digital age: “In our city it is not always clear when and why agencies deploy algorithms, and when they do, it is often unclear what assumptions they are based upon and what data they even consider. . . . When government institutions utilize obscure algorithms, our principles of democratic accountability are undermined.