Trust your local sheriff!

[The Beez]

Hi 4tH-ers!

There is something I want to talk with you about. Something I've silently kept inside for a long time.

As I created 4tH, it was quite easy to trust the thing. It was straight forward and simple and things were easily traceable.

But then I built something that made the thing more complex, but because I understood the underlying layer quite well, I had confidence that the next layer was quite solid as well - and if it weren't I could easily trace it.

Multiply that by 30 years. At a certain point, you forget all about the first layer. You just blindly trust it. At a certain moment - you forget about *ALL* the layers. You trust them all. 

And all that is fine until an unexpected event happens. Then every layer is all of a sudden in doubt. Panic creeps in. Where do you have to look? There are so many places it can potentially go wrong..

It happened to me this week when I replaced a built-in table with a database solution. The screen just froze straight after I called the database lookup. In isolation the darn thing just worked. What the #$%^&*@ could this be?

It turned out I THOUGHT I was getting the member of a structure, while in fact I was referring to a table address. The member was called "CI_Type" and the structure CIType.

It took me two hours to frantically figure this out. When the idea dawned it was quickly fixed - and afterwards it ran flawlessly - as it should. Proving once more that - although complex - it was rock solid.

Trust your local sheriff.. If someone is making an error - it is most probably you. ;-)

I hope..

Hans Bezemer