I’m recently reminded of this old article by Josh Bloch when dealing with some of our clients. Some people can’t seem to accept that software can have bugs and software can crash (note: in this case it’s not our software). For those of them, I leave them with the following quote from the article I mention:
We programmers need all the help we can get, and we should never assume otherwise. Careful design is great. Testing is great. Formal methods are great. Code reviews are great. Static analysis is great. But none of these things alone are sufficient to eliminate bugs: They will always be with us. A bug can exist for half a century despite our best efforts to exterminate it. We must program carefully, defensively, and remain ever vigilant.
via Extra, Extra – Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken.
If we can’t even get a “simple” binary search working bug-free – by someone with such distinguished credentials – what hope is there for the rest of us for getting complex software to work correctly 100% of the time?