a conversation with andy hunt and dave thomas, the pragmatic programmers.

'The researchers did a test. They took a nice car, like a Jaguar, and parked it in the South Bronx in New York. They retreated back to a duck blind, and watched to see what would happen. They left the car parked there for something like four days, and nothing happened. It wasn't touched. So they went up and broke a little window on the side, and went back to the blind. In something like four hours, the car was turned upside down, torched, and stripped—the whole works. (fixit)

there are ten parts to this talk, that went on from march to may 2003.

'When we say in the book, "Whenever you find yourself thinking something can't happen, put asserts in," that could be misunderstood. We're not saying you have to assert everything. We're trying to undermine the kind of arrogance of the attitude, "I've just written this. It can't go wrong." Clearly there is code, setter and getter methods for example, where there is zero point in doing asserts just as there is zero point in doing unit testing. But it's more the case that this can never happen, because this file must exist. This socket must be open. This parameter must be greater than zero. Those are the ones where maybe that arrogance isn't quite appropriate.' (assertions)