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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

I wrote about this a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655018

The top comment there starts like this:

    What I object to here is the core principle that
    there's something to fix in software development
    terms here.

This is something I feel strongly about, and yet I don't seem to be able to get existing software practitioners to take it seriously. They're happy that everyone else needs it, but convinced that software doesn't.

A bit like many of the doctors.

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The core difference is that programmers do new things every time. Pilots can write checklists for things to do when they fly the plane, because landing and taking off is usually pretty similar wherever it may be. Doctors can do the same. Software is a bit more like engineering in that checklists are largely useless - it's not that we think we're infallible, it's just that we have no idea what should be on the checklists since we don't have standard procedures to write checklists for.

If you look at critical software development they're big on analysis and testing and those kinds of things. Not the same.

> The core difference is that programmers do new things every time.

Boy, it's just as well human biology is so perfectly deteministic and well-understood it can be trivially mapped out, unlike the vastly more complicated field of software development.

You've been watching too much House MD. Most operations are pretty standard.

Static analysis tools are essentially automatic checklists applied to code.

Aviation and medical practice involve lives, unlike (most of the time) software development. Same happens with the speed at which it happens — aviation, as medicine, is a "slow and steady" evolution towards improvement, while software development is ever-changing.

Yes, it would be great to have a better way to identify and tackle common mistakes in software development, but it is not nearly as crucial and universal in software development as it may be in other fields. And, after all, each tool/language is so different that few common denominators exist. In a way, it isn't really an issue — yet people dying from malpractice or negligence (either in aviation, or medicine), is.

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