million lines of code (typically Linux), count the bugs, and write everything up. Like other early static-tool researchers, we benefited from what seems an empirical law: Assuming you have a reasonable tool, if you run it over a large, previously unchecked system, you will always find bugs. If you don’t, the immediate knee-jerk reaction is that something must be wrong. Misconfigu-ration? Mistake with macros? Wrong compilation target? If programmers must obey a rule hundreds of times, then without an automatic safety net they cannot avoid mistakes. Thus, even our initial effort with primitive analysis found hundreds of errors.

This is the research context. We now describe the commercial context. Our rough view of the technical challenges of commercialization was that given that the tool would regularly handle “large amounts” of “real” code, we needed only a pretty box; the rest was a business issue. This view was naïve. While we include many examples of unexpected obstacles here, they devolve mainly from consequences of two main dynamics:

“coDEProFiLES” by W. braDForD PaLEy, httP://DiDi.coM

First, in the research lab a few people check a few code bases; in reality many check many. The problems that show up when thousands of programmers use a tool to check hundreds (or even thousands) of code bases do not show up when you and your co-authors check only a few. The result of summing many independent random variables? A Gaussian distribution, most of it not on the points you saw and adapted to in the lab. Furthermore, Gaussian distributions have tails. As the number of samples grows, so, too, does the absolute number of points several standard deviations from the mean. The unusual starts to occur with increasing frequency.

W. Bradford Paley’s codeProfiles was originally commissioned for the Whitney museum of American Art’s “coDeDoc” exhibition and later included in momA’s “Design and the elastic mind” exhibition. codeProfiles explores the space of code itself; the program reads its source into memory, traces three points as they once moved through that space, then prints itself on the page.