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>But I would put $10 down that if I asked you to assert that all medical software in current use that has never killed a patient because of its software issues is therefore "correct", you'd walk back hard. You'd have to be crazy to assert that all such software is "correct".

I made no such assertion. That's a straw man.

But I think I can safely assume that if the patient dies as a result of the software's functioning, that software is not "correct".

You may disagree, but I think it's preferable to have a patient kept alive by an overly-complex system than killed by a simple, elegant, incorrectly functioning one.

Not to be intentionally blunt or snarky, but I think Drew DeVault's post was a bunch of rambling, hand-waving nonsense. Until today, I wouldn't have expected anyone to seriously argue that simplicity is more important than correctness. But he comes along and makes that very argument, with a self-assured, authoritative tone, but very little in the way of concrete reasoning, and to my surprise, the number of people on HN who apparently agree with him is non-zero.

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