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Comment by tsegratis | Hacker News Reader

its the simple things

  fuzzing
  unittest
  scm
  code coverage

if youre programming without those, youre doing it wrong, and chatGPT isnt going to help

any more im missing?

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Everyone hates hearing this one: Documentation, documentation, documentation. Programming is a social task. Therefore, everything else related to software development best practices branches off from that.

What percent of developers do you think are actively using fuzzing? I would be shocked if more than 1%. Please do not read this as I do not think fuzzing is important! It is very important for system-level software.

I often include valgrind tests before Beta releases, as it is usually going to point out suspect areas needing inspection.

Fuzzing is only really useful for a very narrow range of analysis scenarios. If people understand threading properly: code should be able to take getting hammered, exiting gracefully, and cleanly get re-instantiated.

Also, banning hosts/accounts with an error-rate quota system is more common these days. =3

many languages gracefully handle errors, making those errors transparent to automated detection -- our crashes are now silent correctness failures

this trend in programming culture reduces our ability to do automated error detection!

you make a good point, and a good case for crash early and crash often -- with choice of erlang style recovery, or fuzzing style hard nosed correctness enforcement

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