Comment by mjd
5 hours ago
The author is a mathematician, so when he says “it is not in general possible to find bugs by examining the code” he does not mean it is completely impossible to find bugs. He means only that it is not possible to find all bugs or even any particular bug.
User names match... are you the original author? Why commenting in the third person?
Because it was him... 10 months ago?
it's still weird. if i'm talking about something i wrote 10 months ago i'd say something like, "when i originally wrote this i was trying to say ...".
not "when the author wrote this, he was trying to say"
Ofc you're correct in that sense.
I would add that (related to your "maintainability" point) ensuring the code is as simple as possible, and thus much more likely to be "debuggable by review", is a goal of review. Even that won't prevent bugs in the absolute sense, as you rightly say, but it boosts your probabilities.