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markdennehy

584 karma · joined January 2, 2009

http://stochasticgeometry.ie http://10point9.ie
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markdennehy··on Duct Tape Considered Harmful
Are you asking if I would be happier if there was testing done on my ABS brakes/chemotherapy/fly-by-wire software than if there wasn't? Seriously? You're suggesting there's an alternative?

Or are you saying you base your level of happiness on the experience level of the coders involved rather than their test coverage stats? Because last I checked, experience levels meant very little. The Tacoma Narrows bridge was designed by - at the time - the foremost structural engineers in the world. Their paper on its design was recognised as the single most important paper of its kind in that decade. The bridge still fell, not because they were wrong, but because of something nobody had encountered yet (in this case, aerodynamic flutter).

Critical code is precisely that - critical. You don't leave it to the "gifted engineer" model of development because that always fails. Noone is gifted and diligent 100% of the time, everyone screws up eventually. It's dangerously arrogant to think otherwise. You build a system of work that lowers the probability that those screwups make it into a working system, that's all. Civil and Mech. and other engineering branches have been doing it for decades. We're just getting started on it in this branch of engineering.

markdennehy··on Duct Tape Considered Harmful
"The market" was the motive behind the Ford Pinto memo as well, wasn't it?
markdennehy··on Duct Tape Considered Harmful
What a load of tosh. What is this, the "if it's not on the web, it's not real code" party? Show me an embedded system codebase that any of the duct tape people have put together, systems where failures kill people, and tell me you'd be happy depending on those systems, for your chemotherapy or your ABS brakes or your ATM code or your airliner's fly-by-wire system.

Bugs in systems like that will kill people, and we're getting to a state these days where those systems are becoming more and more embedded in day to day life and the risk to Joe Soap is getting higher. How long until a bad UI in a GPS iPhone app turns out to be a contributing factor in a bad car accident? Or until a web-based medical app with a hidden bug screws up a dosing calculation for a patient?

This whole duct-tape-it-and-ship-the-sucker mentality has got to stop, before someone gets badly hurt.

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