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Comment by wwkeyboard | Hacker News Reader

That being said we've had many times more deaths from bad software than from bad spacecraft(http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~nachumd/horror.html vs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...).

I understand your point that you might write software that has few consequences if it fails, but thats not always the case.

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So, most of the failures in your first link did not result in loss of human life.

There are cases where I need to have software that absolutely cannot fail--and in those cases, I'm going to have a process, and I'm going to have a test suite, and I'm going to have a justification for all the code that makes it into production.

Some bozo with a software engineering license is not somehow magically going to save my ass in that case, and having those things in place let me hire whoever can write code.

This sounds well and good, but again, most of these disasters are the result of bad systems engineering--one of the most famous software errors, the Therac-25 race condition, actually killed people and could have been prevented with hardware failsafes. Having qualified software engineers is at once both overkill and not enough if you're actually serious.

Just look at all the nice folks in IT with Microsoft certs.

The solution for this is to solve it in the domains where it is necessary. If you want to write or adopt software for use in a critical system in aerospace then you need to be a licensed aerospace engineer, etc.

There is absolutely no need to license web developers or those who write the usual line of business software etc.

> Only those whose programs might “endanger the public health or safety, security, property, or the economy will need to be tested.”

I don't think the people pushing for licensing disagree with you that web developers don't need a license.

Are you sure? The description you just gave is unreasonably broad. What does "security, property or the economy" even mean, and what justifies their inclusion?

Yes for the domain knowledge, but what about the software? Do you expect an aerospace or biomedical engineer to understand also how to write safety-of-life system?

Why is that an unreasonable expectation if their job is to write such a thing? If you want to write software for aircraft then I don't see it as unreasonable that you be expected to understand both software and aircraft.

Edit1: A poorly written app could impact the ability to call 911. Even by draining the battery unexpectedly.

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