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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

BTW, there are over 14,000 commits just on the dmd compiler itself, and 120 contributors. Not using a version control system would have caused a complete collapse.

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The CTO of a project I worked on a couple of years ago refused to install a version control system. I basically threatened to abandon ship if he wouldn't relent and eventually he did, but until today I don't think he's fully convinced that it was a good move.

In my "big corporate job" of a few years back I introduced a policy of doing due diligence on suppliers who were writing applications for the company - was amazed to find that some people not only don't use version control systems but can argue with a straight face that they are a bad idea.

I just did DD somewhere and the CEO said with a straight face that 'testing is old fashioned' in response to me flagging their test procedures as inadequate. Some of the stuff you come across just borders on the incredible.

Fortunately most companies have their stuff in order.

We did have a salesperson at one company who complained about us testing stuff as "all it did was find bugs". I think he thought that testing actually created bugs and that if you didn't test the product it wouldn't have any bugs.

Sometimes small children will cover their eyes with their hands and say "You can't see me!"

Manual test cases are old fashioned. Type systems and generative tests are more efficient ways of reaching the same defect rate, IME.

(I assume that isn't what you/that CEO mean though)

Minor usage correction, "until today" should be "to this day". "Until today" implies that something happened today that changed his mind, while "to this day" is saying "even now, as of this day".

(My apologies if this isn't of interest - I'm not trying to be pedantic, but the misusage suggests that English is a not your first language. Most people I know who have learned English as secondary language are interested in these kinds of usage corrections.)

> the misusage suggests that English is a not your first language

It isn't. I'll try to remember, thank you.

He's correct, but it wasn't something I noticed until he pointed it out. Your intent was understood.

The intent was understood, and it's a pretty minor quibble. But I agree that line threw me for a second as well, and I had to read it twice. I was expecting the next line to be "and then today our version control totally saved our butts!"

I honestly cannot understand that mindset. What were his reasons?

Another great advance was the autotester. DMD has always had a test suite, but Brad Roberts wrote a plugin for github that essentially prevents merging pull requests unless they pass the test suite. I highly recommend it.

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