←back to thread

Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

(jsomers.net)
303 points FigurativeVoid | 4 comments | 14 Oct 24 18:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | source
Show context
JohnMakin ◴[14 Oct 24 20:55 UTC] No.41841889[source]▶
I wasn’t aware there was a term for this or that this was not common knowledge - for me I refer to them as “if I fix this, it will break EVERYTHING” cases that come up in my particular line of work frequently, and my peers generally tend to understand as well. Cause/effect in complex symptoms is of course itself complex, which is why the first thing I typically do in any environment is set up metrics and monitoring. If you have no idea what is going on at a granular level, you’ll quickly jump to bad conclusions and waste a lot of time aka $.
replies(2): >>41842110 #>>41842227 #
1. JackFr ◴[14 Oct 24 21:28 UTC] No.41842227[source]▶
I’ve come across (possibly written) code that upon close examination seems to only work accidentally — that there are real failures which are somehow hidden by behavior of other systems.

The classic and oft heard “How did this ever work?”

replies(3): >>41842317 #>>41842499 #>>41843287 #
2. JohnMakin ◴[14 Oct 24 21:41 UTC] No.41842317[source]▶
I think this stuff is really funny when I find it and I have a whole list of funniest bugs like this I have found. Particularly when I get into dealing with proxies and reponse/error handling between backend systems and frontend clients - sometimes the middle layer has been silently handling errors forever, in a way no one understood, or the client code has adapted to them in a way where fixing it will break things badly - big systems naturally evolve in this way and can take a long time to ever come to a head. When it does, that’s when I try to provide consulting, lol.
3. QuercusMax ◴[14 Oct 24 22:01 UTC] No.41842499[source]▶
In at least a few cases I can think of, the answer was almost definitely "it actually never did work, we just didn't notice how it was broken in this case".
4. macintux ◴[14 Oct 24 23:26 UTC] No.41843287[source]▶
Many years ago I was grading my students’ C programs when I found a program that worked without global variables or passing parameters. Instead, every function had the same variables declared in the same order.