3 ms·
Was my first thought too. He's judging "workload" by how much time it takes up front to write a program, which may be an important metric for "move fast, break
by SkyMarshal 10y ago
Was my first thought too. He's judging "workload" by how much time it takes up front to write a program, which may be an important metric for "move fast, break things" social/mobile/local/web apps and the like. But he doesn't mention error rates, maintenance costs, LoC, or any other metric that mission/safety/life critical systems prioritize.
The world view underlying this post is one of the reasons for shoddy software and all the breaches, data thefts, etc. that have successfully exploited systems flaws in recent years.
- agentultra 10y agoSoftware doesn't have to be safety critical in order to do harm. Security vulnerabilities, data loss... these all cause harm to the public interest. Whether by snooping, lost profits, online harassment -- these are problems we would be seeing less of if software developers took the view to construct software with fewer errors in the design stage. We simply do not because the practice of writing high-level specifications in the form of mathematical models or proofs is not common. I think the tools have become sophisticated enough and the maths approachable enough that it should be and can be used in the construction of non-safety-critical systems.
- lightcatcher 10y agoI also think his upfront time estimates were off. He estimated Ruby to be ~15% more productive than C. I don't write Ruby, but I do write a lot of C and Python. I'd estimate that it takes 5x less time for me to write a program in Python than C. Even if the 5x number is off, it's still a way larger reduction factor than 15%!