Perfect Code

Jim Gray's disappearance has lead me to reflect on the things he has written that have stayed with me. One them is perfect code. In
Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques Jim talks about perfect code; code without bugs. He even gives an example, a simple function of a few lines that adds two numbers together. In fact it took him a couple of attempts to get it right! Jim makes the point that perfect code is possible, just very expensive. He goes on to talk about the cost of code in terms of dollars per line. NASA pay the most, but their code still has bugs! The astronauts board the shuttle with a bug list, an example of which was not to use the two keyboards on the shuttle at the same time because the inputs would be OR'd! Perfect code is possible, just really expensive.

Most people are surprised when I say that perfect code is possible, they just assume that all code contains bugs. I was reminded of this while following the Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken thread on binary search implementation bugs. At the time I hit the library to check Knuth's version of binary search; he didn't let me down. Someone who invents their own ISA to express their algorithms isn't going to get caught by an overflow.

I am sure the attitude that all code contains bugs must have a detrimental effect on programmers, it has on me. It is also re-enforced by the open source mantra "release early, release often". Testing doesn't solve all the problems either: "Testing can only prove the existence of bugs", Dijkstra.

I recently re-read the History of System R. The name Franco Putzolu cropped up, Jim mentioned him in the acknowledgements of "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques" as someone who had made huge contributions to the field of transactions and databases but who never got the public recognition as his name was not on a lot of the famous papers.
From the System R history (Copyright attached):

Mike Blasgen: The RSS didn't have any bugs. [laughter] No, it's true, the reason is because much of the RSS was written by Franco. No, it's really true; Franco never wrote a bug. Except for one,
right, Bruce? Did you find one?

Bruce Lindsay: One.

Mike Blasgen: He wrote about half of RSS, and I think we found one bug. And that was after nine years.


RSS was the storage part of System R and used B-Trees. It was 35,000 lines of code to solve some pretty hairy problems, and had only one bug! Remember too that the tool support back then must have been terrible compared to today. Pretty perfect then.
 

Copyright (c) 1995, 1997 by Paul McJones, Roger Bamford, Mike Blasgen, Don Chamberlin, Josephine Cheng, Jean-Jacques Daudenarde, Shel Finkelstein, Jim Gray, Bob Jolls, Bruce Lindsay, Raymond Lorie, Jim Mehl, Roger Miller, C. Mohan, John Nauman, Mike Pong, Tom Price, Franco Putzolu, Mario Schkolnick, Bob Selinger, Pat Selinger, Don Slutz, Irv Traiger, Brad Wade, and Bob Yost. You may copy this document in whole or in part without payment of fee provided that you acknowledge the authors and include this notice.