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So, while in general I've enjoyed other things Joe Armstrong has written, I think this talk is pretty discombobulated and doesn't have a coherent narrative.

Here are some of the problems Joe posed:

  - bugs in software like Open Office, Keynote, grunt
  - code not being commented
  - computers booting slowly
  - computers using too much energy
  - code being written for efficiency rather than readability

He talks about distributed hash tables at the end. An interesting topic, definitely cool, but they have nothing to do with the problems he posed earlier.

This seems more like a disconnected list of gripes, plus a completely unrelated list of things he currently finds neat to think about. Which is totally fine, but I don't think it makes a particularly great talk.

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I think it goes with the title of the talk. 'The Mess we're in' is not limited to any one of those items in particular but a total view when you add all of those up. Bugs, badly documented code, slow boot, energy consumption and hard to understand code all contribute to the mess we're in. And it's far from an exhaustive list.

Many of those would be fixed if there was a real concern for quality with corresponding responsibility when things go wrong.

I think the bigger issue is the existence of 'disclaimers'. Software production is the only branch of industry that I'm aware of that is capable of getting out from under manufacturing defect claims in that we state categorically (as an industry) that we have no responsibility, liability or even obligation to fix in case we ship a defective product. That really needs to change.

Disclaiming liability and such is an important F/OSS norm. Of course, proprietary software will improve on this (only) if forced to by competition. The omnipresence of EULAs is a much bigger problem, though. I think the F/OSS norms are better all around.

> Disclaiming liability and such is an important F/OSS norm.

Indeed. So there can be a market for companies that take on liability when serving commercial customers using F/OSS code that they have audited and that they feel exposes no more risks than they can bear. The original authors should definitely not be liable if they label their code as alpha or beta quality and do not wish to be exposed at all. They are doing a service to society. But once you aim your code at being used in production by entities that can suffer vast losses if your code turns out to be defective (in other words, if you sell your stuff to a business or private person) then you should be liable for those damages, or at a minimum you should insure against those damages.

Compare software to for instance the engineering profession to see how strange this software anomaly is.

One way or the other, the problems with software are mostly a matter of economics and incentives.

Computers and software are the way they are because of the set of tradeoffs that the market rewards.

It's certainly possible to write software with fewer bugs, that consumes fewer CPU cycles, memory, starts faster etc...: but it does less. So far, most people and businesses prefer software that does more at the cost of slower boot times, more CPU usage, and a few more bugs.

I think it is mostly a lack of choice. If everybody does it then 'the market' becomes a de-facto monopoly and someone trying to do it right would not stand out in a meaningful way until it is too late. After all, all software is presented as 'bug free' until proven otherwise. Your bug free (really) software looks just as good as my bug free (really not) software on the outside.

Six months down the line, when my not so bug free code eats your data I will point to that line in my EULA that says I'm not liable. Nobody will care, after all it is your data that got lost, not theirs. The fact that your EULA does not have that line and that you offer a warranty does not count for anything until someone would be willing to pay a premium. The only people that would like to pay that premium are the ones that lost their data...

So it's an industry phenomenon. Imagine extrapolating this to buildings. Engineers claim their buildings will stand. Those engineers that talk nonsense will be sued out of business. But if they could disclaim responsibility they would continue to happily practice their borked trade and as a rule people would suffer from this. And so engineer became a word that actually meant something.

But in software 'engineer' is roughly equivalent to 'can hold keyboard without dropping it'.

> Your bug free (really) software looks just as good as my bug free (really not) software on the outside.

No, actually, it looks a lot worse: given the same time and developers, the bug free software will do way less than the buggier software. That, or at feature parity, the bug-free software takes more time and/or requires more people, so arrives later or costs more.

I don't have any direct experience, but I suspect there are niches here and there where the market and/or regulations put a premium on no bugs. Avionics? Some categories of medical software?

Being able to sell software has precious little to do with the actual product but everything with marketing. So my crap software might (on the outside) look even better!

You can only tell good quality software from bad quality software by auditing the code, not by observing the software from a users perspective (unless it refuses even to perform the basics).

Observing the software from a user's perspective is all that counts, though. Marketing is important, yes, but if you're in a niche where quality counts more because bugs cost your users money, then people will sit up and take notice, eventually.

Some industries have decided that software really does matter, and go to greater lengths to make sure it works.

It'd be annoying if Things for iOS crashed and lost all of my data. It'd be horrifying if flight control software crashed and all aboard a plane were killed. It stands to reason that some software is and should be held to higher standards than other software. It probably doesn't make sense that all software should be held to the same high standard, as it is extremely time- and resource-consuming to ship avionics software. Do folks really want to dish out a few $thousand for a copy of Things for iOS?

And some companies do already take responsibility for open source software. In aerospace development, we routinely use GNU software that has been thoroughly inspected and certified as good by companies that accept many thousands of dollars to stand behind it. (Of course, if we were to upgrade from their GNU Foo 2.1.0 to the FSF's copy of GNU Foo 2.2.0, then all bets are off.)

Granted, then the price of such software will skyrocket. The price people pay for most software accounts for the fact that such liability is not covered. Couple that with common software development practices, as well as time invested.

It's not merely accepting liability, there are a whole slew of changes that need to come before this, and frankly, I doubt most people would pay for that. Indeed, if people want to be covered now, they can be. They just have to pay for it.

This is why companies that really need good code have internal developers.

There are a couple of things that seem incoherent, but maybe I'm missing something:

- Is the only reason why he touches upon the limits of computation and computing efficiency that it secures distributed hash tables and that there is space for improvement in terms of energy consumption, respectively?

- It seems contradicting that he advocates biologically inspired systems and lowering entropy at the same time. Aren't biological systems even messier than current computer systems?

- Wouldn't the 'condenser' very likely require AGI to be of any use for us?

DNA is a posterboy for spagetti code.

You have a function, it codes for a gene. Only then you have it's anti-sense translation, which can also code for a gene. And then you have post-translational processing, which takes that gene-product and makes into any number of other things. And then you have DNA binding proteins which effect readability, so that gene can code for a different gene when the normal start/stop codons are made accessible or inaccessible further up the DNA strand. And then the whole program also grinds to a halt if you remove any of the "junk" because the junk is used to control execution (translation) speed and inhibit the program from self-destructing (cancer).

Who designed that? Unbelievable.

A wise old graybeard who wrote the book on evolutionary and genetic algorithms.

Came here to see this. I expected to see a well reasoned argument for functional programming and how entrenched the OO mentality is. What's the mess we're in again?

What's the mess we're in again?

Capitalism. Nobody gets paid to think about the big problems.

Complexity, the Destroyer of Simplicity. (Joe's talk is broad, perhaps intentionally so, and hopefully will promote some big-picture thinking.)

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