Amazon cargo plane crashes in Texas

Re:Amazon cargo plane crashes in Texas by AnimalMuppet on Sunday February 24, 2019 @03:39PM (#19240492)

I think of it in slightly different terms. Yes, we could build software that reliably. (Perhaps not totally bug free, but, say, with 1/100th of the bugs it currently has.) But that takes a lot more time and effort (say, 100 times as much, as a rough number). That means, because it would take 100 times as much effort to produce each piece of software, we'd only have 1/100th as much software.

Would that be a better world?

Sure, I hate it when my word processor crashes. On the other hand, I really like having a word processor at all. It has value for me, even in a somewhat buggy state, more value than a typewriter does. Would I give up having a word processor in order to have, say, a much less buggy OS? I don't think I would.

I hate the bugs. But the perfect may be the enemy of the "good enough to get real work done".

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Re:Amazon cargo plane crashes in Texas by ethbro on Sunday February 24, 2019 @04:11PM (#19240634)

I look at that as the efficiency distinction.

It goes without saying that if we had more time, there would be fewer bugs.

But there are also things (tooling, automation, code development processes) that can decrease the amount of bugs without ballooning development time.

Things that decrease bugs_created per unit_of_development_time.

Automated test suites with good coverage, or KASAN [1, mentioned on here recently]. Code scanners, languages that prohibit unsafe development operations or guard them more closely, and automated fuzzing too.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/dev-tools/kasan.html

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