When we programmers find an aspect of software that fails intermittently, we sometimes follow the impulse to add retries with a Churchillian insistence that we will "Never give in — never, never, never, never"! But sometimes the right thing is to give up.

One might ask, why retry at all? Didn't …

This is a continuation of thoughts after reading Design by Contract by Example by Richard Mitchell and Jim McKim. This time I want to write a little about design by contract without direct language support. What do you give up without language support, and is it still worth it to …

I recently finished reading Design by Contract by Example by Richard Mitchell and Jim McKim. The book, as its title suggests, gives advice about writing good contracts through a set of principles applied in various examples. In addition to wanting to learn more about design by contract generally, I came …