Please Congratulate My New Assistant

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Mon Jan 25 21:25:28 UTC 2021


On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 08:03:53PM +0000, Paul Backus via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On Monday, 25 January 2021 at 12:48:48 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
> > But, at the same time, I guess it could be a bit demoralizing you
> > know?
> 
> That's true. Sometimes, reality is demoralizing. That doesn't mean we
> should hide our heads in the sand and ignore it.
[...]

I think we're looking at this in the wrong way.  While we should
certainly work on fixing bugs and thereby improve the language, it's a
mistake to try to optimize the number of bugs as a metric.  Reducing the
number of bugs equates to improvements in the language *only when the
closed bugs correspond to changes that improve the language*.  Reducing
the number of bugs as a metric on its own does not necessarily equate to
language improvement.

For example, we could declare by pure fiat that starting from today, D
has zero bugs, and implement this by closing all bugs in bugzilla.  Does
that mean that D is now perfect?  Of course not.  All it means is that
we've buried our heads in the sand and pretended that there are no more
bugs.  The language, however, remains in exactly the same state as it
was yesterday, warts and all.  The act of closing the bugs *has not
improved the language by one bit*.

Now look at this another way.  Suppose we start with the current state
of the language, but with zero reported bugs.  Then we open the
floodgates for people to try out the language and report bugs.  Every
bug report, every issue, that gets filed tells us something that we
weren't aware of before: an area where the language could be improved.
IOW, every bug report is an *opportunity for improvement*.  If after we
opened the floodgates no reports are filed, that doesn't mean the
language is perfect; rather, it means the language is dead and nobody
cares enough about it to file bugs anymore. Or the language has reached
a dead-end and cannot be improved any further. The fact that people are
still filing bugs means (1) the language is still alive, and (2) there
is plenty of room for improvement. I.e., we're not at a dead-end.
There's plenty more to look forward to.

So don't look at the bug count as some kind of liability to rid
ourselves of by whatever means possible; rather, look at it as a sign of
life and the opportunity to grow.


T

-- 
MSDOS = MicroSoft's Denial Of Service


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