Comment by crabbone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crabbone | Hacker News Reader

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Let me introduce you to medical ethics... Unlike in engineering, ethics is a mandatory subject for medical students. And while there's a long-winded explanation for why it is that way, the short and an immediate explanation is that if you don't understand ethics, you, and the hospital that employed you, and the insurance company that pays for you will be sued out of profession. Because people's health and ultimately lives are at stake, and people become very touchy when someone dies or loses a limb unnecessarily.

I don't know what the situation is with other (mechanical, electrical etc.) engineering students, but I'm very much certain that the legal fiction that software comes with no warranty whatsoever is going to expire. Perhaps sometime soon. And then users of the said software will be allowed to sue, and, what do you know, ethics will suddenly be factored into CS curriculum ;)

I've been arguing for strict liability for defects in closed source since forever. I really hope you're right.

My reading of the situation is that the legislation was lacking in the programming department because of both the desire to make faster advances in the field (where regulations would potentially impede those) and not having enough expertise to come up with sensible regulations as well as regulating bodies.

I see the breaking point in the programmers supply catching up and outgrowing the demand. I predict that this will cause a chain reaction that will lead to establishing regulatory bodies, industry-wide accreditation, liability for failing to implement industry-sanctioned recommendations. It's hard to tell how long before we get to this point: other fields, especially the well-established ones took centuries to get there. On the other hand, it could be a matter of years, if we decide to copy from others rather than try to repeat their experience.

What CS curriculum? Why would people still be writing code in the future?

Code is a formal language that allows one to disambiguate their intentions (when compared to natural language). Some code is executable by computers, but in the future, it might not be the primary use (who knows?)

In either case, formal symbolic systems are useful. For humans. If there will be humans, they will want to have them. Maybe the emphasis will shift from writing to reading (+editing), similar to how we use photography: the acquisition process is, by and large, automatic, but the follow-up editing isn't. In either way, the ability to understand someone clearly is going to be valuable, and it will encourage the study of formal symbolic systems, that includes programming.

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