Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I had the pleasure once of debugging an issue in C# that boiled down to the difference between a property "Percent" which was represented as e.g. 45.6, and a field "percent" which was measured as a fraction, e.g. 0.456. After correcting a reference to the field to be a reference to the property, I was proud to claim that my fix was a fix of a single bit - the difference between ASCII 'P' and ASCII 'p'.

Can't get smaller than that!



I was at a pompously titled Software Craftsmanship conference, and one of the questions going around was: "what is the minimum commit size?"

My first guess was one character, since you can fix a bug by changing one character. But in the 'P' vs 'p' case, minimum size could be larger - fixing the calling code is fine, but is there a change that can be made to stop this bug appearing in other calling code? Eg, simplify the interface so that one of the 'p's is protected, so that the wrong Percent can't be set by accident.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: