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Comment by DLarsen | Hacker News Reader

While this scenario may not allow developers to work like they normally do, I think the author's point is that a simple binary search isn't that complicated. A decent dev should still be able to a pretty good job despite those artificial constraints.

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And the author is simply wrong about his point (if that is indeed his point). A binary search is that complicated. It just doesn't look like it until you've considered all the possible edge cases, and chances are that most "decent devs" will miss some and be part of the 90%.

It isn't complicated compared to the convoluted stuff that programmers code to implement business "logic." The dirty secret of software development, however, is that 90% of industrial software developers can't handle abstraction at all and rely heavily on domain knowledge when coding anything. Programmers handle the cases that are normal for the problem domain, and QA tests the cases that are unusual in the domain context (and makes the programmer fix them.)

The code will behave incorrectly on some edge cases, but if the developers and QA have covered the problem domain pretty well, it won't matter. First, most of the edge cases will never happen. Second, people get angry when software fails for no obvious reason, but they tend to be a lot more forgiving when software fails on inputs that are "freakish" or "wrong" in the domain context. Searching the widget catalog results in "500 Internal server error" when the widget catalog is empty? Well, duh! When should the widget catalog ever be empty?! The search page shows screwy results because someone entered an item with a negative price? Well, duh! Get that stupid item out of the catalog! Instead of thinking like a mathematician or a system designer in order to avoid mistakes, the typical development approach is to think like the customer so you only make mistakes that the customer can sympathize with.

I think there's a lot of truth here.

I would also point out that for a lot of programming tasks, particularly in a corporate IT environment, "thinking like the customer" can be a good thing: it helps you make sure that you are building something that truly helps the customer do their job.

The risk is that no matter how much "domain experience" you have, the customer has more, and you can fool yourself into thinking that you understand what they need better than they do.

Speaking as the author: his point, if any, is more along the lines that if we need a test-as-you-go approach to get something this simple to work, it's no wonder we have problems when we have to implement something that's actually complex.

Also: no amount of test-drivenness can save you from just not grokking the problem (as Peter Norvig's Sudoku solver showed ... er, by counter-example.)

I'm missing the back story -- tell me more about Peter Norvig's solver?

http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-at-w...

http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

A binary search is that complicated. It just doesn't look like it until you've considered all the possible edge cases

The fact that it's tractable to rigorously consider all the edge cases means it is ridiculously simple compared to common real-world programming tasks.

If you read Bentley's original work that the article is based on then the point is exactly that even the most seemingly simple tasks like implementing a binary search are incredibly difficult if not near impossible to get "right."

If binary search is complicated, what is _simple_ by your standards?

FizzBuzz?

Which only 50% of us can solve correctly the first time?

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