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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

This also works if you are aiming for stable software - I can't find the quote or who to attribute it to:

> The only bug-free line of code is the line of code that is never written.

Somehow this reminds me of this quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

This is why I find myself writing fewer bugs when I'm writing Python. I write less and have less to mess up.

This is actually why I find myself writing fewer bugs when I'm writing Java than Python. Thanks to static typing, I don't need to endlessly repeat myself writing and updating boilerplate unit tests and boilerplate documentation (and inevitably messing up)

I've heard about PEP484 and hope it catches on, but unfortunately it's for python3 and a lot of people are still stuck on python2 for many reasons.

cough That's kind of why I feel like Haskell is a superior language to most others.

Too true. I read an account of some product being ported to F# (from C#) a few years back. The line count was substantially decreased (at least one order of magnitude if I'm remembering correctly) with a correlated decrease in defects. I can't find the original post, but there are plenty of supporting testimonials[1].

[1]: http://fsharp.org/testimonials/

Yeah, as someone who gets to use F# fairly regularly, actually, it's a substantial improvement in the LOC department compared to Java or C#. I don't find it quite as reliable as something like Haskell (do to the fact that you don't have to be explicit about side-effects), but it's definitely better than most languages.

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