are programmers "failures"?

[mfleming]

(03-23-2019 02:01 PM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  What I am really wondering is this: do modern programming languages make it more likely that a programmer will generate a correct program the first time? I suspect the answer is "somewhat, but not totally."

There was an old joke about Ada that when you finally got the program to compile, it would work correctly! Seriously though, a subset of Ada called Spark with its associated tools is used in automotive and aviation safety-critical software development. I don't think any programming language itself can guarantee correctness. I'd say there's a close resemblance between the Correctness Problem and the Halting Problem.

~Mark