• PiedPipetter@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I wrote code for industrial automation years ago (think assembly line machines). I was reviewing production code and found a stupid bug and fixed it, then reinstalled. The motors moved incorrectly - I don’t recall if that was the time it smashed glass everywhere, but “fixing” the code definitely broke the program. I could not figure out why…but due to time constraints I sadly had reinsert the bug to put the machine back in production.

    Some nights that still bothers me.

    • tal@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

      Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

      Donald Knuth’s webpage states the line was used to end a memo entitled Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion (1977)