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Comment by AlexDenisov | Hacker News Reader

Discipline is a good thing, but it does not scale.

I work on a tool for mutation testing for C/C++[1] for a few years now. During this time I was thinking about tests, tools, people, etc. a lot. Here is the summary of my musings:

Quality of software depends on several factors such as hardware, operating system, programming language and tooling used to build the software in the first place, etc. For decades we try to improve each of those aspects. But, the most significant and most harmful factor is the human. Naturally, we cannot improve developers, but we can decrease the destructive influence of a human being by using better tooling.

[1] https://github.com/mull-project/mull

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Or alternately: we can improve developers, but doing so is hugely expensive and time-consuming, and while we can improve them we can never make them perfect. So making tools that can be used safely by imperfect developers is always going to be simpler and more cost-effective.

Exactly, this is what I mean by "do not scale." It takes many years, if not decades for one to become a decent developer. We simply cannot afford this.

We can't afford it with the current pipeline, but perhaps with a better pipeline, we can. Perhaps something more proper and akin to the older engineering disciplines? Or to doctors?

They're doing incredibly important jobs, and spent an appropriate amount of time learning and proving them selves.

Software is now completely critical in so many aspects of the world, and becoming more so. When people's lives are at risk, we can certainly afford 'many years'.

Yes, not everyone is working on perhaps safety-critical systems, but more and more people are. It's not just safety in the physical sense either, but emotional and mental well-being too. Facebook isn't saving potentially affecting lives as how a doctor would (more 'physical'), but social media definitely has emotional and mental effects.

I think this is a fallacy. I believe another pipeline does not necessarily produce better doctors. They also make mistakes; sometimes those mistakes cost people lives.

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