It Is Time To Call Out TDR Publicly

[pinback]

PAUL:

Both GERRIT HAMILTON and BEN PARRISH have sent you emails over the past couple of days, both of which you have either NOT RECEIVED or REFUSED TO REPLY TO.

I am CALLING YOU OUT PUBLICLY until you get your email shit straight.

[ChainGangGuy]

I'd heard getting in touch with Paul was hard, but I had no idea it'd be this difficult.

[Tdarcos]

I'd heard getting in touch with Paul was hard, but I had no idea it'd be this difficult.

I am busy with a lot of things. I get email easy, I just don't always check it on a constant basis. I am trying to write a text adventure and get around the bugs I didn't know were in Hugo, going out to buy food and such since my credit card now works, plus, don't forget, I am disabled, that means at times I stop and take a nap for a few hours.

My usual time of being awake is 6pm until about 2am or so. I tend to be a night person. And sometimes I get tired and can't stay awake that much.

Plus I get a lot of email sometimes, and I have to go through and dump the spam, and if I don't know you and your message looks like spam, it may get deleted unread. Send me anything where the subject is ALL CAPS, in a foreign language, in mojobake, or looks like you're asking me to invest in some overinvoiced oil contract or that I should get back to me immediately, and chances are that message goes right down the crapper.

[Tdarcos]

PAUL:

Both GERRIT HAMILTON and BEN PARRISH have sent you emails

Ben, I got yours. I have not received anything from a Gerrit Hamilton, in my inbox, in the deleted messages (trash) or even flagged as spam.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I am trying to write a text adventure and get around the bugs I didn't know were in Hugo

There aren't any bugs in Hugo. If you think you've found a bug in Hugo, you haven't. It is bug-free. This is going to be difficult to fully understand, but when developing a game in a brand-new language, the problems are probably going to be with the coder, not the language, at first.

[RetroRomper]

(...) the problems are probably going to be with the coder, not the language, at first.

"Wetware" is a valid ticket item.

Lame Joke Of the Day: How do you debug wetware? With a shotgun!

[Tdarcos]

I am trying to write a text adventure and get around the bugs I didn't know were in Hugo

There aren't any bugs in Hugo. If you think you've found a bug in Hugo, you haven't. It is bug-free.

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit. "Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining."

I read - here in fact - that someone wrote a game that caused the Hugo compiler to crash. A program that crashes because of bad input is by definition not bug free. Some asswipe PR flack from Microsoft once tried to claim that if a Word document was contaminated or badly formed, Microsoft Word would crash as a safety feature! Any brain-dead moron knows that's an excuse and justification for bugs and errors. (Actually it was because Microsoft had no interest in fixing an existing version, preferring to sell people the upgrade to the next release.)

Any software application of any significant complexity has errors in it. This applies even more explicitly to a closed-source application like Hugo, where the compiler internals are not public and thus nobody but the developer sees it.

Over time, an application subject to regular use and examination with bug fixes becomes closer and closer to error free, but never quite makes it because if it is a living application, it will be subject to updates and improvements. But any change leads to the possibility that the change can affect something badly and break the application(s). Eventually there are so many interconnections that making changes becomes too dangerous because it's really easy to break something unless you are extremely careful. This situation continues, until the application becomes so bloated and fragile that it makes sense to rewrite it.

At that point it starts over as a brand-new application, full of bugs that have to be found and corrected.

Now, there are exceptions, but to get to that state means the application has to be designed from the beginning to allow for enhancements and maintenance. This requires detailed specifications, advanced planning and proper design, which is extremely expensive to do, meaning that all of which are virtually nonexistent in any software package unless it is designed to do something ultrahazardous, like operate a nuclear power plant, a pacemaker, or the control software for an airliner or fighter jet, and sometimes not even then.

I've been doing programming for 34 years; don't try to tell me there's such a thing as a bug-free application. Once any program gets much longer than "Hello World" the probability of bugs goes up exponentially.

The story of IBM's "IEFBR13" program for its OS/VS1 mainframe operating system, which was created to do nothing and yet required an update because it failed to correctly do nothing indicates that as long as human beings write computer programs, even the simplest ones, they will have errors.

[Flack]

Was the problem with the mainframe the same as Hugo in that it wouldn't print numbers?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

There WERE bugs, yeah, but a bunch of us had it certified. There aren't any bugs any more.

There's a software quality control company called ISOWARE4000. They do code audits. I couldn't afford them for Crypto, but a bunch of us pooled our monies together and paid for a --

[Tdarcos]

There WERE bugs, yeah, but a bunch of us had it certified. There aren't any bugs any more.

There's a software quality control company called ISOWARE4000. They do code audits. I couldn't afford them for Crypto, but a bunch of us pooled our monies together and paid for a --

Okay, I'll qualify my opinion and there's your answer, which follows what I said. You paid for the very thing that only really proves software to be bug free: an expensive software audit, which is, as I stated, normally done only for software that demands high reliability.

To expect that kind of audit in a single person created game development platform is so extremely unlikely as to have, under normal circumstances, a probability so near nil as to round to nil.

[Paul Robinson]

Okay, I'll qualify my opinion

Shut up, TDR and quit while you're behind. You got pwned, and you know it, and your attempts to spin it are just the weak attempts of an incompetent PR flack to do so.

Soldier, shut up and soldier, Commander.

[AArdvark]

I like the Paul Robinson personality better than the Dr. Tacos one.



THE
SYBIL
AARDVARK

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

There WERE bugs, yeah, but a bunch of us had it certified. There aren't any bugs any more.

There's a software quality control company called ISOWARE4000. They do code audits. I couldn't afford them for Crypto, but a bunch of us pooled our monies together and paid for a --

Okay, I'll qualify my opinion and there's your answer, which follows what I said. You paid for the very thing that only really proves software to be bug free: an expensive software audit, which is, as I stated, normally done only for software that demands high reliability.

To expect that kind of audit in a single person created game development platform is so extremely unlikely as to have, under normal circumstances, a probability so near nil as to round to nil.

My bad - I meant to log on afterwards and say that I made this up, so you'd see both posts back to back. I was just kidding, we didn't get it audited.

There's a bug tracker around somewhere with some Hugo issues, but it's pretty good for the most part. I was just goofing when I said it was 100% bulletproof.

Did you ever see this article on NASA code? It's fascinating: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html

It's nice to know there is some place on earth really doing their best to make bug-free code.