R. Clayton (rclayton@monmouth.edu)
(no date)
One of the themes I'll be harping on in class is that your code is talking
about you, and you want to make sure you code is speaking well of you. In case
you think this is just a personal hobby horse I'm riding, I'd like to direct
your attention to the paper "Using Redundancies to Find Errors" by Yichen Xie
and Dawson Engler
http://www.stanford.edu/~engler/p401-xie.pd
The thesis of the paper is
We expect that redundancies, even when harmless, strongly correlate with hard
errors. Our relatively uncontroversial hypothesis is that confused or
incompetent programmers tend to make mistakes.
Here are a few more quotes from the paper:
This includes cases where the programmer checks the same condition multiple
times within very short program distances. We believe this could be the
indication of a novice programmer. (Section 5)
These results indicate that (1) files with redundant errors are good audit
candidates and (2) redundancy correlates with confused programmers who will
probably make a series of mistakes. (Section 6)
It strongly suggests that redundancies often signal confused programmers, and
therefore are a good predictor for hard, serious errors. (Section 6.2)
Redundancies seemed to flag confused or poor programmers who were prone to
other error types. (Section 9)
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