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Comment by ScottFree | Hacker News Reader

> Software Engineering is new.

I believe one of the examples for extreme reliability used in the XKCD cartoon included in the article is air travel, which is about as old as computers.

I was told once that the reason air travel is so reliable is because they have mechanical backup systems for when the electronics inevitably fail. Is that true?

How reliable are electronics as a whole?

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No, it's not true. Air travel is as reliable as it is because it's considered to be a system Airplanes, their design, manufacture and maintenance. Airports, communication systems, procedures for entering, transiting and exiting an airspace, fault reporting, accident investigation and much more. All of those things are part of the "system."

What a lot of people fail to do when making comparisons with software is to look at the act of coding in isolation from everything that surrounds it. That leads to a very skewed perspective.

> How reliable are electronics as a whole?

Given sufficient time, budget and management will very reliable system can be made. The probes have software too, so there’s that...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program

If an aircraft's engine dies mid flight pure physics of falling generates speed and the plane at speed generates lift so you slowly descend in a (semi) controlled manner. In a flight sim you just plummet to the ground unless someone thought far enough ahead to your virtual engine dying and implemented ambient aerodynamics to make sure a gliding mechanic would work.

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