[TenTec] Programming bugs

[John Clifford]

Hmmm... I'm running Win 2k Pro and haven't had to reboot in weeks.  As a
user, I haven't encountered a bug in MS Access, MS Excel, or MS Word in
years.  I think that most users never run across bugs in Microsoft apps or
operating systems.  I will agree with the 'conventional wisdom' about only
buying version 3 or later of any Microsoft product :-) like WinCE v3.0,
Windows 3.0, Access 95 (v3.0), etc., not because earlier versions were so
buggy but because Microsoft usually has the product really figured out by
v3.0 and therefore you get really neat software.  But, before you bash
Microsoft and claim how stable Unix is, consider how many releases of Unix
have been out, and how long Unix has had to mature as an operating system
(coming up on two decades for System V Unix core code).

Stuart, as a former Microsoft software developer, I'd be willing to bet that
Microsoft puts a lot more effort into producing bug-free software than most,
if not all, of its competitors.  There is a LOT of in-house
development-level tools, pre-processing, and code, that is specifically
aimed at detecting and eliminating bugs, not to mention the tens of millions
of dollars (hundreds of millions for the bigger products like Windows) per
release that is spent on testing for each release of each product.  Many of
the advanced debugging and error-checking features that people see in
released versions of Microsoft C were developed by various in-house
development teams for their product years ago... and many in-house tools
have never been released to the market because they do provide a competitive
advantage (not from inside knowledge, but from man-years of development and
investment).

Despite all of this, it is most likely that NO software of any complexity
will ever be released that is completely without software defects either in
logic or coding.  Even NASA has an acceptable software defect rate (very
low).  Perfection has a price.  If the consumer was willing to not accept
ANY improvements in a product (like the Orion firmware, or Windows, or
fly-by-wire flight control systems) for years, then the # of bugs could
easily be reduced to those that would never be found by a normal user with a
normally configured computer (or perfectly functioning radio or airplane).
But, until consumers are willing to pay money for new releases of existing
software that only have bug fixes, then "good enough" is going to have to be
good enough.  Microsoft does have a policy of making patches freely
available to fix egregious bugs.

Re flowcharting, pseudocoding is a better approach to the same thing since
it takes up less space for the same amount of info... and it makes great
comments.  Sometimes a picture can be explained by considerably less than a
thousand words.

 - jgc

John Clifford KD7KGX

Heathkit HW-9 WARC/HFT-9/HM-9
Elecraft K2 #1678 /KSB2/KIO2/KBT2/KAT2/KNB2/KAF2/KPA100
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email: kd7kgx at arrl.net


> -----Original Message-----
> From: tentec-bounces at contesting.com
> [mailto:tentec-bounces at contesting.com]On Behalf Of Stuart Rohre
> Sent: Friday, June 13, 2003 10:51 AM
> To: tentec at contesting.com
> Subject: Re: [TenTec] Programming bugs
>
>
> Sad to say, I know of no software that comes to the user bug-free.  My
> soapbox on this is it all started with programmers abandoning
> flow charting,
> which at least forces the programmer to look at his code and where it goes
> before it is released.
>
> Sad to say, I doubt if you can find coding sheets on the market.
> Look at the Microsoft products---the software users willingly pay
> for inept
> and bug laden operating systems, and thus there is little incentive for
> software vending to do any better than the biggest vendor of them all.
> 73,
> Stuart K5KVH
>
>
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