Random Errors

August 14th, 2007
[ Geek ]

I cringe and do my best to bite my tongue whenever someone claims an application has a “random error”. In all my years working in computers I have yet to encounter a random error.

Computers are a lot of things but random they are not. Okay sure, if you write a random number generator that introduces a bug some of the time then technically it’s random but it ain’t really “random”. Wow…

Errors are only random until you discover the pattern, and then eventually the cause. That’s the challenge and frustration in debugging applications. It’s detective work.