No test for the wicked

In 1631, the respectable duo of London royal printers, Robert Barker and Martin Lucas were commissioned to print a new version of the King James Bible. Almost to perfection, they did a wonderful work. Actually, considering the hundreds of thousands of words the book contains, omitting just one is pretty good. Unless, of course, it is placed smack right in the middle of the seventh commandment, and the word omitted is “not”. In this case, you get a 180 degree turn on the better accepted meaning of the commandment, which is now “Thou shalt commit adultery”.

I wouldn’t have no luck at all

It is hard to come up with a worse place for fate to intervene, gently nudging those mirror imaged type pieces (we can all guess the finger used). Well, I guess going up one commandment in the list could have been worse. This bible is known as the Wicked Bible, and also as the Sinners’ Bible, for obvious reasons.

a linked list of unfortunate events

User acceptance tests being what they are, the whole debacle took a year to be discovered. The printers were fined a hefty sum, which helped pushing poor Mr. Barker down into an unfortunate spiral, ending in his death in prison.

No cactus available

I can’t help but imagining the scene in the editing room, where the two printers are debating the page layout, the spacing between the special characters that show which lines have corrections over past versions, and in general giving extra care to this so important page. In the background, a small word manifests as the instrument of their demise.
I agree with the claim that a major portion of code review can be retained, even when the developer’s partner is completely silent, as long as the developer explains the code out loud. To paint a little image for that, explaining your code to a cactus will greatly benefit the quality of your code. Regretfully, it seems that Robert Barker and Co decided to skip on desert flora office decorations. I’m pretty sure that if such a cactus was available, reading the passage aloud and dramatically would have revealed the bug.

We live in a glass house

Before we dismiss the unlucky royal printers as foolish, let us remember that a surprisingly amount of bugs we encounter are a result of silly Boolean logic mistakes. We wanted to check one thing, we checked the exact opposite. Today we can reach the opposite conclusion by adding or subtracting a single character, we don’t need to mess up the whole 3 characters in NOT. When you sin, and skip code review, get the sinners’ bible as your just reward.

 

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/21/rare-sinners-bible-on-sale-bonhams-auction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Barker_(printer)