Why is software buggy?

January 7, 2009

For some time I’ve studied why programmers create bugs, and how they understand and then fix them. One of the obvious causes is that programmers misunderstand the problem/requirements/solution, and therefore code an incorrect (buggy) program.

Nothing I’ve seen thus far so simply shows this phenomenon, and the clear contention between programmers of the solution, than this post from CodingHorror (one of my favorite programming-related blogs)

The problem of the unfinished game

In summary, you meet someone and they say that they have two children, and one of them is a girl. What is the probability that the person has a boy and a girl?

900-odd comments later, and there’s some, agreement of what the answer is