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HUGE AND MESSY. "Poorly defined criteria are already the bane of any programmer's existence. Does anyone in the world, outside of a few aerospace projects, have a 100% consistent and unambiguous specification to work from? A Boeing 787 has around 10 million lines of code. A modern car, around 100 million. Do you think anyone at Ford understand all 100 million lines? Do you think they have complete specifications for all that code?" https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

JERRY RIGGED CODE. "Under the hood, most critical software you use every day (like Mac OS X, or Facebook) contains a terrifying number of hacks and shortcuts that happen to barely fit together into a working whole. It would be like taking apart a brand-new 747 and discovering that the fuel line is held in place by a coat-hanger and the landing gear is attached with duct tape.”  (Ben Cherry). https://lnkd.in/dKSjpup View in LinkedIn

LIMITS OF HUMAN COMPREHENSION. "Does anyone still really believe that all computer systems they use today are perfectly comprehensible to the humans who work on them?" https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

LOGICAL BREAKDOWNS. "Everybody who learns concurrency thinks they understand it, ends up finding mysterious races they thought weren’t possible, and discovers that they didn’t actually understand it yet after all." (Herb Sutter, chair of the ISO C++ standards committee, Microsoft). View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE deals with the concept of imperfection in nature. Darwin had a massive influence on the subject, even though he broke with an even stronger world view before him that was based on a religious view. Even today, we have an underlying and often unspoken assumption that nature is always striving towards perfection, and these ideas are rooted in the past rather than reality. View in LinkedIn

THE 500 MILE EMAIL is a cute story about a perplexing problem caused by programmer error. http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html View in LinkedIn

BUILT-IN BUG PATHS. "It's important to add that using those defects (instead of designing around them like humans do) can lead to improper work quite easily, depending on stability of the power supply, temperature or magnetic field." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

MYR PROCESSOR YEARS. "Sure, if you write a mutation algorithm that silently runs for a few million processor-years, sure you won't understand the result... but that's a fault of your programming." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

WORKAROUNDS. "There are other electrical things going on (capacitance, crosstalk, etc) in chips that we normally design around." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

DEDUCTIVE THINKING. "Any algorithm whose result you cannot predict or understand was poorly coded, even with 'random' evolution bits. It comes down to reporting and logging; a genetic algorithm should report when it gets a certain good result from a mutation, and you should log enough of these mutations to analyze trends. At the end you should know how each piece of the computer generated architecture evolved." https://lnkd.in/dEAsbig View in LinkedIn