Hacker News Reader

Comment by rebuilder | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me this is one of those situations where the programmer mindset does not properly interface with the lawyer mindset.

In programming, you have true and false, and generally things fall into one or the other category with no human input.

In law, you have concepts like "reasonable", and a whole lot of human input, by design.

So my expectation would be that if software vendors were to be held responsible for bugs in their products, the standard they would be expected to adhere to would be "reasonable expectation of proper functioning", with humans intepreting what "reasonable" means.

View on HN

On the contrary, it's the legal perspective that's most worrying. If every software bug carries the potential for liability, there's no way your legal department will let you have a widely-visible bug tracker, or easily report bugs at all. It'd be much like copyright violations are treated today, where there's a formal process to raise the issue and everyone's specifically trained not to discuss them openly.

What makes software so special in engineering, aside from the amazingly terrible culture we've crafted around it?

Change the phrase "software bug" to "engineering error". Then consider the liabilities involved with the manufacture of any real-world-might-kill-someone product. The lawyer's view starts to make a helluva lot more sense.

> What makes software so special in engineering, aside from the amazingly terrible culture we've crafted around it?

Millions of malicious people constantly attacking it with cheap equipment from a distance with little chance of being caught doing so?

Whilst that is true, it doesn't have to be that way. If from day one, liability for software bugs lead back to whomever wrote the code, then the world would be a much different place.

For one thing, we would be much more conservative in how we wrote code. Libraries would be vetted, with insurance contracts attached to them. Programming languages would not allow for dynamic data, type coercion, or weak typing. In the 80s, rather than C rising to prominence, Ada would have. Haskell would be our generations Javascript, and XHTML would have won over HTML5 simple because guessing how rendering should work would open up a browser maker to high fines and lawsuits.

We'd have to rewrite our entire software stack from the ground up. It's not impossible, but we'd have to view it as a multi-decade transition like how the chemical industry was slowly forced to not use heavily polluting procedures.

The pace of software innovation to lack of liability from simply writing code has brought us the entire information age.

Other engineering disciplines are very conservative. Due to age, this doesn't compare well to software.

There is tradition, but a lot of it military in origin, not civil: ARPA net, Grace Hopper, and the first bug, Turing and the Enigma. Stealworking as a military secret in comparison is thousands of years old. And so far, leaked DB content has per the official record not killed anyone ... perhaps a few astronauts but none of the people responsible in place to fix it, as would be the case in a family of incorporated electricians.

We need a code-code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com