Carmack about static analysis

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/24/2011 06:42 AM, bearophile wrote:
> A new blog post by the very good John Carmack, I like how well
> readable this post is:
> http://altdevblogaday.com/2011/12/24/static-code-analysis/

Nice! One nice snippet that I can't quote strongly enough:

"Automation is necessary.  It is common to take a sort of smug
satisfaction in reports of colossal failures of automatic systems, but
for every failure of automation, the failures of humans are legion."

This is a very important tidbit. We've improved participation of
automation to D's development process a fair amount, but we still have a
long time to go.

"Anything that isn’t crystal clear to a static analysis tool probably 
isn’t clear to your fellow programmers, either."

This I disagree with; I think it comes with the assumption that static 
analysis tools Carmack tried don't even try to approach certain 
problems. There are plenty of things that are relatively simple but 
extremely difficult to automatically prove correct.


Andrei