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Good call, imagine you had a task like taking the input from the form for the employees wage.

A good developer with no knowledge of IEEE754 might do something like this:

  float hourlyWage = hourlyWageTextbox.text.floatValue();
While a hacker with intricate knowledge of IEEE754 might insist that everyone do the following:

  string hourlyWage[] = hourlyWageTextbox.text.split('.')
  int hourlyWage = hourlyWage[0].to_int * 100 + hourlyWage[1].to_int
It's essential to get rid of all these hackers who just slow down the dev process with extra unnecessary code. After all a quick unit test will show that there's no benefit from all the extra work of storing currency values as cents.


And then the developer with ISO 4217 experience realizes that splitting the input on '.' doesn't cut it. The Indonesian rupiah is formatted 1.234,56; the Japanese Yen is formatted 123,456; the Lebanese pound is formatted 1 234.

The rabbit hole goes deep. Be careful when you think you've reached the end of it.


Well, while the developer might have cased a few rounding errors, the people with an hourly wage of 6.8325 are in for a nice bonus paycheck the month the hacker starts work...


Haha good point


isn't the hacker the first guy and the developer with experience the second guy?



I thought the same thing, re-read the essay and am still confused.


Definition of "hacker": http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

A "developer" is usually someone who just codes for money, isn't into it, and therefore probably sloppy.




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