One Line Times Two

[billroper]

I fixed two bugs today by removing one line of code for each bug.

(Ok, I made another small change for one of the bugs, but it was cleaning up something else on the call stack that could have caused a problem under some circumstances. I think *that* change was three lines.)

One of my friends at work notes that if you take fewer lines of code to do something, you reduce the opportunities for introducing bugs. If I can manage to delete down to zero lines of code, there will be no bugs left at all.

Wait! There's something wrong with that...

Comments

[grey_lady]

The way I heard that from my CS prof was that every program can be reduced by one line of code and will have at least one bug. Therefore programs can be reduced to one line of code with a bug.

[madfilkentist]

Any non-trivial program has at least one bug. Therefore, any bug-free program is trivial.

[rinioth]

zero lines of code would be the perfect program. It would have no bugs and it would actually meet the specification and the marketing information, both of which would say that it does nothing.

Err... maybe the marketing info would lie and say it actually did something.