Member-only story
When Programming, Remember That Elephants Don’t Bite — Mosquitoes Do
It’s the tiny mistakes you make that have the biggest drawbacks
On June 24, 1996, the European Space Agency’s unmanned Ariane 5 rocket exploded only 37 seconds after launch. $370 million and a decade of development were flushed down the drain in a single moment.
The cause? A simple software bug that attempted to store a 64-bit float variable that can represent billions of potential values into a 16-bit integer that can only represent 65,535 potential values. There literally wasn’t enough space allocated to make it into space.
The lesson? It’s the smallest bugs that cause the largest, costliest, and most potentially dangerous issues.
Elephants Don’t Bite, They Just Want to Be Your Friends
When reaching program failure, almost every blatantly obvious mistake reveals itself in code. These are mistakes that cause clearly discernable compiler or runtime errors that unmask their identities through the user interface or on compilation.
These mistakes are nearly never a cause for concern because it’s made apparent to us as developers that these are issues that immediately need to be addressed.
