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Comment by Areading314 | Hacker News Reader

fixing bugs is more important than trivial stuff like swagger, css variables, or adding new test frameworks. Function over form

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But isn't having no bugs to begin with better then fixing them later?

The argument was that you'll have less bugs if you use these technologies after all. And I have to agree wrt styling inconsistencies and css variables at least. They're extremely good at standardizing design without getting in the way of the developer

CSS variables, test frameworks, are good tools for catching bugs -- but at the end of the day the goal is that the code should work and be easily maintainable. Best practices help you do that, but theres many instances of a code base full of bugs that has to be maintained and improved over time. Developers who turn up their nose at "fixing bugs" are of no use to a business. These ideas are great when starting a new codebase but thats not the situation a developer is going to be in most of the time in practice. And if you follow every best practice there will still be bugs that need to get fixed.

You're arguing with a straw man then. Their argument was that only solving bugs is an issue, because you should be taking preventative measures so they're occurring less frequently.

If the bugs are all your doing, I agree. But many times the developers working on a project are maintaining code that was written years ago before they even joined the company, by other devs that had totally different incentives.

Honest question - have you ever worked on a codebase with 0 bugs? I don't think that's feasibly. What you're asking for is an infallible god-like programmer.

You will always have bugs. The best engineers can solve the hardest bugs

Honest question - How did you get from "less bugs" to "0 bugs"?

Maybe because there’s a bug in your statements. You use “no bugs” and “less bugs” to describe the same point.

It's feasible to create no bugs with formal specification and formal verification. For example, with Lean 4, one can add a proof for each array-access-by-index that the index is within the bound of the associated array. Every aspect of the codebase can be subject to formal proofs that are verified by the compiler. See also CompCert and Sel4.

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