The short answer is of course "unhappy", but once we delved into the philosophical side of our profession...

Disturbing it may sound, but in fact, programming is a stochastic process. Bugs happen, and you cannot do anything about it. And bugs happen randomly - the programmer does not plant them in intentionally.

There are techniques to get the odds better - no reason to detail them here, these fill up books - what books - bookshelves, libraries. And, contrary to what many of them try to say, they don't come free. Actually, they come at the highest possible price - the time and brain of every and each programmer has to be invested into learning them and using them in the everyday practice. This results in an exponentially increasing price per bug rate reduction, quite inevitably.

Now what may be even more frustrating is that discovering bugs is a stochastic process, too. In this regard, the "happy" bug is the one which demonstrates itself immediately - won't compile, will crash unconditionally.

Again, there are techniques and tools promising to improve or even automate this process, but they again inevitably fall short of these promises. The cost vs. (discovered) bug rate tends to follow exactly the same exponential pattern as with the "not-writing" bugs case above.

So, at the end of the day, the best thing we as programmers can do is our normal "human" way of coping with things - we have try to learn from our and others errors, each and every day.

This is what this forum is all about (except the fun side of it), isn't it.

Jan Waclawek