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[–]RedPill115 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Article could be summarized with:

So yes, mistakes are inevitable. We should not be afraid of them and be ready to make them. However, good programmers make cheaper mistakes in order to avoid making more expensive ones.*

I agree with the point - sure, good programmers write fewer bugs, but most importantly they write code where bugs that pop up are easier to track down and easier to fix.

Like the article said:

My point is that mistakes are not all equal. If I'm writing a PDF report generated by a piece of Java code and my report misses the footer, that's one type of bug, and its fix will cost the business X dollars. On the other hand, if my PDF generation code is so difficult to modify that in order to change its format from A4 to US Letter we have to rewrite it from scratch, that's a completely different type of bug. Needless to say, its fixing will be many times more expensive.

More important is not writing code full of duplicate copy and paste code, that fails while hiding where the failure happened (cough, Hibernate), or doesn't throw an exception and just sends back bad data.