QA Hates You

Duran Duran, “Wild Boys” from 1984, which is before the internal clocks of many of our compatriots in this industry began, the damn kids.

In 1985, I wanted to look like Simon Le Bon. In 2013, now that he’s 55, I’m closer than ever.

I clicked through a retweet to an article entitled “Which Programming Language Should I Learn First? on Lifehacker.

And then I almost fainted when I saw the sample code they included for Hello, World programs.

As you know, gentle reader, I’ve often thumped tubs about how any program used to teach students and that outputs Hello World is teaching the youngsters to program defects at the outset because, as “World” in this instance is a noun of direct address, it should be offset by a comma (Hello, World).

So when I saw the sample code included, where the programs for Java and C have that very comma in them, I was amazed. I had to immediately tweet about how it changed my life.

But then I looked closer: In addition to Java and C, the article includes samples of Python and Perl. And the commas are missing.

So I guess it’s more of a crash course in development than the writer intended.

It’s a collection kludged together, and nobody’s going to think to check consistency or know if there’s a problem in different areas of the software except for QA. Because the milestone and the deadline were met.