I got myself involved in a thread on The Code Project Forums that lead to the idea of Robust software, and one of the posters said:

I call an application robust if it’s in use in the real world for a lengthy period of time and no data has been lost and no one has experienced downtime as a result of a bug in that app.
That’s the bottom line in the real world.

(Obviously, this developer never accidently opened a binary file in Notepad — which it will let you do, and is a very quick way to end up in the “data has been lost” scenario.) To which I responded why I was glad that he did not live in my real world, because the criteria he provided was a very low target in my opinion.

However, upon further reflection, while I still may not want developers like that in my world, I would just love to live in his! Imagine – not having to worry about things like data consistency across distributed systems, ordering, synchronization, and distribution of asynchronous events! Not having to think about the amounts of money that could be affected just by one little bug in the code somewhere because hey! – it did not lose any data, and the trader kept on using the system, right?! That would be heaven!

It would fan-effing-tastic to be able to use Notepad as the model of what “robust” means! When was the last time you used Notepad? How long has it been around? Ever lost data or experienced downtime due to a real bug in it?

Imagine how much more simple developer’s lives would be if that were the case…! Hell, at least I know that I would sleep better at night!