🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <RSW.91Apr13042119@delay.cs.brown.EDU> rsw@cs.brown.EDU (Bob Weiner) writes:
> In article <4243.2805b94a@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com> klimas@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com writes:
> > 	Some info that I picked up from a company doing a lot of big
> > 	project work with C++ (i.e. strong type checking language) was
> > 	that postmortems on their project revealed only 10% of their
> > 	errors were captured by strong type checking.
> I doubt that any professional software designers are willing to log every
> instance that their compiler spits out an error.  Their productivity might
> drop considerably.

It takes no effort to log every compilation. I do, and I know others who
do. It does take effort to log every little change you make to your
program, and every run-time error; I don't know of any C++PSE, though
the company might have developed one internally.

> Hence it is a fair bet that this company did not have
> an accurate record of errors detected by a compiler for a strongly typed
> language.

It's a fair bet that the 10% was fabricated by some programmer who at
the last minute was put on the spot and told to produce some statistics.
But I'd believe that it was in the ballpark: a language which forces you
to know what data types you're using will reduce type errors.

---Dan