asr comments on PSA: Learn to code - Less Wrong

34 Post author: John_Maxwell_IV 25 May 2012 06:50PM

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Comment author: thomblake 29 May 2012 06:27:30PM 0 points [-]

programmers routinely display flawed thinking (in the form of conceptual bugs) that don't seem to stem from cognitive biases.

Can you give an example?

Comment author: asr 31 May 2012 08:15:26AM 1 point [-]

Sure. A common source of bugs is that different developers or other stakeholders have different expectations. I say "this variable is height in feet", and you assume it's meters. I forget to synchronize access to a piece of state accessed from multiple threads. I get over-cautious and add too much synchronization, leading to deadlock. I forget to handle the case where a variable is null.

None of those feel like cognitive biases, all are either common or infamous bugs.