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Comment by avgDev | Hacker News Reader

When I hear "move fast and break things", I am reminded of a guy that I worked with. He delivered work fast......full of bugs...0 planning...and his daily ritual was to just keep patching the "pile of shit" he put together.

He has now moved on and we sometimes chat, he works for a huge corp, still sucks at writing SQL.

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And as I said, people think the alternative to "fast, full of bugs, 0 planning" is automatically "slow, no bugs, lots of planning" but it's often "slow, lots of planning, just as many bugs"

When you are in a complex spiderweb you simply cannot move fast. If you are moving fast you are not looking at everything and it will blow up in your face.

True.. which is why you want simple systems that are easy to understand and iterate on.

The worldwide air traffic control system is not simple or easy to understand and iterate on. And that's not because it was designed by idiots, or that you're so much smarter and more experienced and a vastly better programmer than the combined efforts of everyone in the world working on air traffic control, as you seem to be implying from your comfortable armchair.

Are you proposing the entire world simply give up air travel, because government regulations and industry standards and the laws of physics and chaos theory prevent you from having the simple easy to understand air traffic control system you envision?

Who said anything about the worldwide air traffic control system? Did you mean to reply to a different thread?

Or, you can have complex systems with PROOFS like CompCert and Sel4. With formal methods, you can move as fast or as slow as you like.

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