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Comment by dodobirdlord | Hacker News Reader

> We all know that bugs in software happen and it’s impossible to write bug free code

The go-to counterexample is the code that ran on the space shuttle, which took years and hundreds of people and $200 million to produce. I have been told that nobody has ever found a bug in the final production system. The development practices involved in creating it seem like they would make most software engineers want to curl up and die. One tidbit from the following link I found is that 60 people spent years working on the backup flight control system, intended to never be used!

https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch4-5.html

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Well we could mandate that self-driving cars be programmed to the same standard. I mean it means that self-driving cars will simply never exist, but we could mandate it!

Maybe we shouldnt run safety critical code of which we dont know what it does. Hard realtimesystems exist for a reason. Sure it would also be nice if we could drive nuclear power plants at home via a smartphone app, so the most qualified expert could help in an emergency, but its simply not a sane idea.

This cop out of "Software gonna have bugs" as a way to evade all liability doesnt hold in any other profession. I dont see why we get special treatment here.

It does hold, in some form or other, in other professions. The EPA formally defines how much cash they're willing to burn to save a human life, which seen from one perspective is an "environment gonna kill people" cop out. Nuclear missile silos have two operators because "people gonna launch nukes". Cars have airbags because "vehicles gonna crash". Every field has risks and risk management, every field has certain steps that they could take for the purpose of safety that are judged too expensive to justify the risk, and part of managing risks in software is that you should plan for bugs and plan to mitigate their impact.

Nobody calls the emergency services out because they assume cars are going to crash and plan accordingly, so why does the software engineering industry get called out for assuming software will go wrong and planning accordingly?

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