1147
They Need To Stop Doing This
(kerala.party)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
1147 points (98.6% liked)
Programmer Humor
19282 readers
1793 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
“The other programmers keep accidentally writing code that ends up in an infinite loop. I'd like you to make a program that can reliably detect that.”
You may joke, but if I had a penny for every time someone asked me to solve a problem, that basically boils down to the halting problem, I'd be rich.
I have always wondered why the answer to the halting problem isn't: "If no output has been returned in X time, BREAK, restart program from beginning."
Because that will fail to detect a program that halts in X+1 time. The problem isn’t to detect if a program that halts halts, the problem is to generally create an algorithm that will guarantee that the analyzed program will always halt given an infinite time running on an infinite computer.
Yes, that is the theoretical rational, but in use cases, if users always restart the program after X minutes, practical you can just hard reboot
But you could also do a mean time analysis on specific tasks and have it cut off at a standard deviation or two (90-98% of task times covered), and have a checkbox or something for when the user expects longer times.
You could probably even make this adaptive, with a cutoff at 2x the standard time, and updating the median estimate after each run.