While following the white rabbit into a discussion of “context rot,” it hit me that the old concept of “garbage in, garbage out” still applies. While grabbing a link to the wikipedia page, I came across this chestnut of a quote:
On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
— Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
Foolish people, asking dumb questions, great for a laugh.
But today it hit me that Babbage, unable to deliver a production-ready version of his general-purpose computer, also had little experience with software testing. In that context, the question is one worth asking. If garbage input produces the same result as correct input, one starts to lose confidence in the application being tested.
Oh, and if you’re interested in problems with contexts, Drew Breuning wrote a great post, “How Long Contexts Fail.”