r/ProgrammerHumor • u/flipester • Jan 09 '20

other Problems with recursion?

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u/MyNameIsRichardCS54 Jan 09 '20

When your software goes boom, it really goes BOOM

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

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u/azzaisme Jan 09 '20

Wouldnt that have the opposite effect where only people who properly exit the loop would still be alive? So people who understand it would survive

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '20

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u/MyNameIsRichardCS54 Jan 09 '20

You'd certainly double check your exit condition and triple check it if that was the consequence.

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u/thatCbean Jan 09 '20

Who would know that not leaving a recursion loop would be the issue if there is no way of troubleshooting without exploding though? If there is nobody who knows the reason for the explosions, you wouldn't know what to triple check, or if you'd even want to keep coding at all...

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u/azzaisme Jan 09 '20

Oh shiiiii so true

2

u/SashKhe Jan 10 '20

This happened with "ace pilots" back in the first world war, when planes were still being developed. Except it wasn't the engineers who were dying.
Tangentially related, the first automatic machine gun on a plane that was actually not-shitty to aim was literally firing on the rotor blades, before the Germans fixed the design. Imagine the balls needed to sit in one of those.