April 2021
Intermediate to advanced
433 pages
10h 45m
English
Content preview from Cloud Native Go
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Chapter 6. It’s All About Dependability
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.1
C.A.R. Hoare, Communications of the ACM (October 1969)
Professor Sir Charles Antony Richard (Tony) Hoare is a brilliant guy. He invented quicksort, authored Hoare Logic for reasoning about the correctness of computer programs, and created the formal language “communicating sequential processes” (CSP) that inspired Go’s beloved concurrency model. Oh, and he developed the structured programming paradigm2 that forms the foundation of all modern programming languages in common use today. He also invented the null reference. Please don’t hold that against him, though. He publicly apologized3 for it in 2009, calling it his “billion-dollar mistake.”
Tony Hoare literally invented programming as we know it. So when he says that the single most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user, you can take that on some authority. Think about this for a second: Hoare specifically (and quite rightly) points out that it’s the intention of a program’s users—not its creators—that dictates whether a program is performing correctly. How inconvenient that the intentions of a program’s users aren’t always the same as those of its creator!
Given this assertion, it stands to reason that a user’s first expectation about a program is that the program works. But when is a program “working”? This is actually a pretty big question, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.