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digitalmars.D.announce - Patterns of Human Error - my presentation at the DC ACM

reply Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:
The slides: http://www.slideshare.net/dcacm/patterns-of-human-error

A review: 
http://computopics.dcacm.org/2011/05/04/review-dcacm-patterns-of-human-error-with-walter-bright/

Anyone want to reddit this?
May 05 2011
next sibling parent reply Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org> writes:
On 5/5/11 9:04 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
 The slides: http://www.slideshare.net/dcacm/patterns-of-human-error

 A review:
 http://computopics.dcacm.org/2011/05/04/review-dcacm-patterns-of-human-error-with-walter-bright/


 Anyone want to reddit this?
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h5ehu/patterns_of_human_errors_link_to_slides_in_the/ Andrei
May 05 2011
parent reply Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org> writes:
On 5/5/11 10:18 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 On 5/5/11 9:04 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
 The slides: http://www.slideshare.net/dcacm/patterns-of-human-error

 A review:
 http://computopics.dcacm.org/2011/05/04/review-dcacm-patterns-of-human-error-with-walter-bright/



 Anyone want to reddit this?
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h5ehu/patterns_of_human_errors_link_to_slides_in_the/ Andrei
Unfortunately the post has been junked. I wrote a polite message to the moderators, you all may want to do the same. Thanks, Andrei
May 06 2011
parent reply "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:
"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:iq0eqf$l03$1 digitalmars.com...
 On 5/5/11 10:18 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 On 5/5/11 9:04 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
 The slides: http://www.slideshare.net/dcacm/patterns-of-human-error

 A review:
 http://computopics.dcacm.org/2011/05/04/review-dcacm-patterns-of-human-error-with-walter-bright/



 Anyone want to reddit this?
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h5ehu/patterns_of_human_errors_link_to_slides_in_the/ Andrei
Unfortunately the post has been junked. I wrote a polite message to the moderators, you all may want to do the same.
Is there anything reddit doesn't auto-flag as junk?
May 06 2011
parent Florian Weimer <fw deneb.enyo.de> writes:
* Nick Sabalausky:

 Is there anything reddit doesn't auto-flag as junk?
Perhaps content that is actually viewable and accessible?
May 07 2011
prev sibling next sibling parent Lutger Blijdestijn <lutger.blijdestijn gmail.com> writes:
Nice slides, very simple and elegant. 

This reminds me of when I started with D. I found a lot of these 'details' 
unload quite some burden I had with C++ and made programming that much more 
enjoyable.
May 06 2011
prev sibling next sibling parent reply bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
Walter:

 The slides: http://www.slideshare.net/dcacm/patterns-of-human-error
Nice. Please put your PDFs everywhere but Slideshare. I'd love a simple link to just the PDF, thank you very much (Slideshare requires Flash, JavaScript, other things, and the flash viever doesn't allow me copy&paste of URLs like that joelonsoftware.com one or snippets that I have to copy manually here). ----------------- - 9V battery: it has keyd connectors *and* inverting its polarity often doesn't lead to large damages (you may damage the curcuit in some cases). This means that a car batter has to be designed *safer* than a 9V battery because an error often causes more damages than in 9V batteries. -----------------
 Simple fix: make l suffix illegal. No more possibility of this error. End of
story.
This is exactly the solution used by JSF-AV. They use a pre-compiler that generates a "compile" error if you use "l" as suffix (and maybe even if you use it as variable name). So they aren't using normal C++. -----------------
 int i = 1_000_000;
A downside of the current implementation is visible here: long i = 1_000_000_00_000L; The underscores are not enforced every 3 (or 4 on hex/binary literals) digits. But in practice this has not caused me troubles, so far. -----------------
 Error Patterns Eliminated [Slide 32]
It's a very nice slide :-) -----------------
 i should be size_t [Slide 31]
Something related to this has caused me a not immediately visible bug in D, this is the original correct function: double[][] matgen(int n) { double[][] a; double tmp = 1.0 / n / n; a.length = n; for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) a[i].length = n; for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) for (int j = 0; j < n; ++j) a[i][j] = tmp * (i - j) * (i + j); return a; } Second "improved" version: double[][] matgen(int n) { double tmp = 1.0 / n / n; auto a = new double[][](n, n); foreach (i, row; a) foreach (j, ref x; row) x = tmp * (i - j) * (i + j); return a; } Problem: (i - j) gives a wrong result because i and j are now unsigned. See some of the discussion: http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D.learn&article_id=26563 http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D.learn&article_id=26587 http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D.learn&article_id=26629 -----------------
 Uninitialized memory [Slide 41]
This compiles with no errors, but maybe you meant heap memory: safe void main() { int x = void; } -----------------
 Validated data: validated!(T) [Slide 46]
I don't remember/know what this is. Thank you for all this stuff you give us for free, people used to pay for such texts. -----------------
 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/wrong.html
From the blog post:
All strings that come from the user must be stored in variables (or database
columns) with a name starting with the prefix "us" (for Unsafe String). All
strings that have been HTML encoded or which came from a known-safe location
must be stored in variables with a name starting with the prefix "s" (for Safe
string).
A better solution: http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/10/18/a-type-based-solution-to-the-strings-problem Bye, bearophile
May 06 2011
parent reply Andrej Mitrovic <andrej.mitrovich gmail.com> writes:
Is that a typo on page 31?

"<= should be ="

maybe <= should be <

I guess that further drives the point though. :)
May 06 2011
next sibling parent bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
Andrej Mitrovic:

 I guess that further drives the point though. :)
Yup .I didn't see it. Bye, bearophile
May 06 2011
prev sibling parent reply Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:
On 5/6/2011 8:13 AM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
 Is that a typo on page 31?

 "<= should be ="

 maybe<= should be<

 I guess that further drives the point though. :)
You're right. Good catch.
May 06 2011
parent reply Brad Roberts <braddr slice-2.puremagic.com> writes:
On Fri, 6 May 2011, Walter Bright wrote:

 On 5/6/2011 8:13 AM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
 Is that a typo on page 31?
 
 "<= should be ="
 
 maybe<= should be<
 
 I guess that further drives the point though. :)
You're right. Good catch.
That was the first error I caught.. since I've seen you use it as a common error and reason to use foreach() style loops before.
May 06 2011
parent reply Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:
On 5/6/2011 1:46 PM, Brad Roberts wrote:
 That was the first error I caught.. since I've seen you use it as a common
 error and reason to use foreach() style loops before.
Interestingly, nobody saw all 5 bugs.
May 06 2011
parent reply bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
Walter:

 Interestingly, nobody saw all 5 bugs.
A good C lint has caught three of them, plus gives an extra suggestion: 8 for (i = 0; i <= dim; i++); diy.c 8 Warning 574: Signed-unsigned mix with relational diy.c 8 Info 737: Loss of sign in promotion from int to unsigned int diy.c 8 Info 722: Suspicious use of ; 14 } diy.c 14 Warning 533: function 'find(long *, unsigned int, long)' should return a value (see line 6) diy.c 14 Info 818: Pointer parameter 'array' (line 6) could be declared as pointing to const Bye, bearophile
May 06 2011
next sibling parent reply bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
Walter:

 Interestingly, nobody saw all 5 bugs.
You show this as a bug: typedef long T; But did you meant to write this? typedef long long T; With this change the C lint finds this bug too. Bye, bearophile
May 06 2011
parent reply Andrej Mitrovic <andrej.mitrovich gmail.com> writes:
I still giggle at the "long long" name. Good thing there are no floats
floats and char chars.
May 06 2011
parent Kagamin <spam here.lot> writes:
Andrej Mitrovic Wrote:

 I still giggle at the "long long" name. Good thing there are no floats
 floats and char chars.
`long` is not a type, it's a modifier and - accidentally - a shortcut for `long int`. `long long` is a shortcut for `long long int`. `short` is a shortcut for `short int`. `signed` is a shortcut for `signed int`.
May 11 2011
prev sibling parent Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:
On 5/6/2011 3:50 PM, bearophile wrote:
 Walter:

 Interestingly, nobody saw all 5 bugs.
A good C lint has caught three of them,
C lint is not standard C. That's just the trouble with 3rd party tools. They: 1. are not part of the language 2. have wildly varying effectiveness and quality 3. have no standardized behavior 4. get out of sync with compiler & language changes 5. tend to have installation issues like all 3rd party add-on tools do 6. tend to not be available on the same platforms the language is on 7. are not routinely used For real progress to be made, the *language* must be improved.
May 06 2011
prev sibling parent reply Kagamin <spam here.lot> writes:
bearophile Wrote:

 A better solution:
 http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/10/18/a-type-based-solution-to-the-strings-problem
 
What do you think about unittesting efficiency section?
May 11 2011
parent reply bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
Kagamin:

 What do you think about unittesting efficiency section?
I always use unit testing, in Python I especially like doctests. But often unit tests aren't enough, so I use Contracts too. Type system-based solutions too help, a quotation I've read elsewhere (written by a Haskell programmer):
Rather, what you need is a way to make deep structural changes to your code,
and still end up with a fair amount of confidence that the result is at least
reasonable, that you haven’t forgotten something big. Unit testing won’t do the
job; there are just too many false failures, since making such a large change
tends to invalidate huge swaths of your unit tests anyway.  You already know
that they won’t work, because you deleted or changed the arguments to the
pieces that you were testing.  Indeed, while test-driven development works
great for the vast majority of programming tasks that fall squarely in the "not
difficult" category, it has a tendency to crystallize the code a bit quickly
here.  You don't want to be told about and need to fix every place something
changed; you want to know specifically when you've made changes that are not
consistent between themselves. That, of course, is the job of a type system.<
On the other unit tests are about single functions, and often small leaf-functions don't need to change if you change other parts of your program, so their tests don't need to change. Generally you use all tools you have to increase the probability your code is correct. Bye, bearophile
May 11 2011
parent reply Kagamin <spam here.lot> writes:
bearophile Wrote:

 Kagamin:
 
 What do you think about unittesting efficiency section?
I always use unit testing, in Python I especially like doctests. But often unit tests aren't enough, so I use Contracts too.
I rather meant the assertion that in languages with duck type system unittesting eliminates to some degree the need for strong type system.
May 11 2011
parent reply bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
Kagamin:

 I rather meant the assertion that in languages with duck type system
unittesting eliminates to some degree the need for strong type system.
I like both dynamically typed languages and statically typed ones, both have other new languages tells me that we're going to languages that try to combine the advantages of both. I sometimes prefer dynamic typing to build prototypes, but sometimes a _flexible_ static typing (like Haskell one) is useful for prototypes too. Unit testing is able to replace some of the tests done by a static type system. On the other hand a type system is able to test _all_ code paths, while the unittests cover only the paths exercised in the tests. So in the end I use about an equal number of unit tests in D and Python. And beside normal unit testing there are other forms of testing, like QuickCheck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCheck ). Very large Python programs (like Zope) implement some kind of interfaces (and recent versions of Python have added ABC, Abstract Base Classes), some some help from a bit more structured type system is useful even in dynamically typed languages when the programs become large. Bye, bearophile
May 11 2011
parent reply Kagamin <spam here.lot> writes:
bearophile Wrote:


we're going to languages that try to combine the advantages of both.
As I understand, this feature is only to simplify interoperability with dynamic type systems like ActiveX, DOM and IronPython. This doesn't mean, it's a feature good by itself.
May 12 2011
parent Caligo <iteronvexor gmail.com> writes:
Have you ever placed a 9-volt battery on your tongue?  It's not very
pleasant, specially when someone asks you to do it and you don't know
what's coming.

On a serious note, the topic reminds me of an interesting book that I
read; The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, "is one of the
classics of human interface design. Norman shows how badly something
as simple as a kitchen stove can be designed, and everyone should read
it who will design a dialog box, write an error message, or design
just about anything else humans are supposed to use." --Qt Docs
May 16 2011