TITLE: Bugs Keep Me Humble
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 29, 2018  8:04 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Joshua Bloch, in
<A HREF="https://research.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html">
    this oldie but goodie</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 The general lesson that I take away from this bug is humility:
 It is hard to write even the smallest piece of code correctly,
 and our whole world runs on big, complex pieces of code.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 Having just written a small interpreter for my programming languages
 course, I, too, am feeling humble.  Even in code that couldn't
 possibly go wrong, I had a small bug that bedeviled me for fifteen
 minutes.  (You have to dereference those bindings in order to get
 the cells you want to mutate...)  The experience is good preparation
 for a couple of software projects I hope to do this summer and for
 my compiler course this fall.

 Oh, and Bloch's old post reminds me that it may be a good time to
 work through "Programming Pearls" again.  It's been a while.
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