Quote:
Originally Posted by ownedbycats
I'm not even sure how that semicolon got there.  thank you |
This isn't intended to be criticism ...
When I was first studying computing back in 1971 we had to submit "card decks", a pile of punched computer cards, to run. If *anything* was wrong it cost us hours, so we learned to carefully check the cards for spelling, logic, and syntactic errors before submitting them. Once submitted we would go to the local all-night pizza or donut shop to wait, only to come back to see the error message "You have too many errors. You must be stoned" (yes, this was a real message) and to do it all again.
Today the time penalty for not checking for errors is near zero, so people don't bother. The process is "hack at it until it seems to work." The downside: people have less understanding of the basic details.
On the other hand, today people are using very complex "APIs" (Application Programming Interfaces) that do an incredible amount of work for you. Problem: these APIs aren't sufficiently documented so the only way to determine what they do is to try using them, over and over until one is confident that the behavior is understood. But of course the behavior isn't understood because the edge conditions aren't tested. Sigh...